Love and Liberty

Introducing Doctor Who – Last Christmas…

Tonight will be Doctor Who’s next Christmas, for this Christmas! If you find Christmas a nightmare, it’s time first to watch Last Christmas, where the Doctor meets Father Christmas – or does he? – and some aliens – or does he? – a bit like the Alien (shh, he mentioned it once but he might have got away with it) – and is trapped within dreams within dreams, a bit like Inception – or is he (spoiler: yes)? If it sounds too disturbing for Christmas, it’s also got some of Doctor Who’s zingiest one-liners, cracking dialogue. Christmas crackers, if you will. Too soon? Or too late? Because Last Christmas is actually from the Christmas before last now.

If you want last Christmas’ Doctor Who, which wasn’t Last Christmas but The Husbands of River Song, my husband Richard has a present for you – freshly delivered, his review. My Ten Reasons here were originally planned for last Christmas, when Last Christmas would in fact have been last Christmas. You see? It would have been immensely amusing. Well, cracker-standard, anyway. Before you grab a shepherd’s crook from the nearest nativity play or panto to pull me off the stage, there’s one more thing I should say in this introduction. I originally started these as a celebration of Doctor Who’s fifty-second anniversary, because the number suggested a year-round set of articles. That went off the rails along with my health. Although my health is if anything even poorer right now, I started again this November and am currently not so very far off target (I’m as surprised as you are). All the blog posts I’ve published in this series since then have been ones that I originally wrote last year, which I’ve re-read, rewritten and republished as Special Editions. I’ve actually now come to the one that I aimed to write last Christmas but wasn’t able to. Which means that, in a mind-bending twist, Christmas is the first time this is original programming and not a repeat. It’s all new today. Wish me luck for the rest.

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski talked about sci-fi series having “Wham episodes”. He doesn’t mean this. It’s good, though.

Ten Reasons To Watch Last Christmas (warning: spoilers lower down the list)

1 – It’s Christmas!

And Christmas is always a day for Doctor Who now. This evening the twelfth Doctor Who Christmas special in a row will be part of BBC1’s festive line-up, so it seemed appropriate to choose one of the Twelfth. Last Christmas is an entertaining Christmas tale, funny, scary (a traditional Christmas horror story), and something to put you off your Christmas dinner – and, for me, easily the best of them since the very first official Christmas special, The Christmas Invasion. I’d better stop typing the word “Christmas” because at this point in the afternoon your eyes are probably already swimming as everything seems to be just Christmas, Christmas, Bloody Christmas (no, that’s TV Smith, not TV) and this won’t be helping. Some of you will be pointing out that there have been countless other, er, Yuletide specials in the worlds of Doctor Who, from Short Trips to audio adventures all the way back to A Girl’s Best Friend and The Feast of Steven, but casual readers will be too drunk to cope with that all right now and that’s my excuse. Anyway, that’s what Google is for.

I wonder if even Steven Moffat realised he’d pulled off a cracker, as the final scene of this one has not one but two callbacks to The Christmas Invasion… Oh no! I said the word. Better move on.


2 – The Doctor.

I love Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, and one of the reasons I so enjoy Last Christmas is that he gives here the most festively themed Doctor performance of all. More on that in a moment.

I was worried in a different way to the usual about the new Doctor when Mr Capaldi was announced for the part. In the past it’s been whether the actor would be right for it and waiting on tenterhooks for their first episode – though I loved Matt Smith from his prime-time interview being announced in the part onwards. But that very day I talked about my fantasy ‘any actor in all of space and time’ casting, too, and they were considerably older than Matt. There’s at least something I love about each Doctor, and my ‘favourites’ among the twelve – thirteen – fourteen – more – keep shifting, but for some years now, my absolute favourite Doctor’s been William Hartnell, and my preference instinctively for someone old, authoritative but unpredictable, acerbic but funny. I’d timescoop Graham Crowden – ironically once offered the role, but he turned it down and was too young anyway – for something like the demented majesty of A Very Peculiar Practice’s Dr Jock McCannon mixed with the child-like enthusiasm of his Tom in Waiting For God. Or go back further and take Alastair Sim (his extraordinary Inspector Poole often makes me wish for a Doctor Who reimagination of An Inspector Calls with Sylvester McCoy’s slightly sinister Time Lord). Coincidentally, my Grandad was rather dashing, came from Glasgow and was both testy and sparkling and I loved him very much. But, I’d keep reminding myself with every new Doctor, the Doctor doesn’t have to be a Scottish actor I’ve thought brilliant for years and who’s just at the right age to be crotchety with a twinkle.

And then they only went and cast bloody Peter Capaldi. This time I was terrified because he seemed just too perfect to be true and it could only go wrong. But you know what? He is nearly perfect after all. And going back to the famous Alastair Sim role inevitably shown again just yesterday, it is impossible to find a better Doctor for the Christmas special than the one who every time is a viper-tongued grouch before he throws everything he has into saving someone else (“There was only one way to get to you…”) and discovers joy all over again (“Yes, but – do you want a go…?”).

Peter Capaldi’s Doctor has always played Scrooge.




3 – Alien.

“They’re a bit like Facehuggers, aren’t they?”
“Face… huggers?”
“Yeah, you know. Alien. The horror movie, Alien.”
“There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.”

Of all the brilliant lines in Last Christmas, this is the one that never fails to crack me up. Especially the Doctor’s face going from incomprehension to being utterly appalled.


4 – Father Christmas.

“There’s not just one Santa delivery team. How could there be? There are five hundred and twenty six million four hundred and three thousand and twelve children all expecting presents before tomorrow morning. So, hmm, that’s twenty-two million children per hour. It’s impossible!
“Obviously, I’ve got a second sledge.”

This year, going all-out for Christmas, it’s the big one – Santa Claus himself (or is he? etc). Nick Frost is utterly brilliant in the role, showing no signs of his usual casting as the dim but well-meaning hot bear (here at the Pole!) best friend, nor of the fear that surely any actor must suffer on being given a role with double nominative determinism. Nick is serious, powerful and only occasionally jolly. And with Dan Starkey (nearly naked from the neck up) and Nathan McMullan (grubby superhero – no relation to tonight) his equally perfectly-cast elves, the sexy one and the sassy one – your mileage may vary on which is which – Santa has assembled a perfect comic team. Because for all the Christmas spirit, drama, hero reindeer neigh, moral of the story and even army of slinkies, what really makes them and makes the episode is all the zingers.

“OK. No. Hang on. Stop. Shut up. What? Seriously, you – you’re Father Christmas. You’re – real.”
“Of course I’m real. Ho, ho, ho!”
“How could he not be real?”
“Huh? How do you think those presents got under the tree every year? By magic?”
“Well, I thought it was my Mum and—”
“Mum and Dad?”
[Derisive cheers and applause]
“Well, of course it was.”
“I mean, it makes perfect sense.”
“Yeah, your Mum and Dad, one day a year, for no particular reason, just out of the blue, suddenly decide to give you a great big pile of presents.”
“No, no, no. Because they love you so much. It’s a lovely story, dear.”
“Yeah, but it’s time to start living in the real world.”

It’s probably my favourite Doctor Who story for Steven Moffat comic dialogue.

“Not often we get upstaged on a rooftop.”

5 – The Dream Crabs.

One of the most ickily successful monsters of recent years, both conceptually and visually horrible, creatures that envelop your head and feed on your brain while twisting it into mind-bending dreams within dreams. They do, as has been noted, look rather like Facehuggers, and that’s not the only way in which they’re familiar, but they’re a terrific monster for all that.

They wriggle when you think of them, they leap from the ceiling on gooey strands, they tie your psyche up in knots. They have the extra-disturbing level in our household that – bear with me on this. You see, there’s another famous Doctor Who monster that’s a sort of crab that messes with your head and which may not be real. The Macra first appeared in 1967’s The Macra Terror with Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, but we saw them again with David Tennant in Gridlock (both brilliant stories, by the way). That 2007 episode was the first to use the season’s big new epic piece of music, known on soundtrack releases as All the Strange, Strange Creatures but always to Richard and me as ‘Dance of the Macra’. But only to us. No-one else has ever called it that. So when Santa Claus comes to save everyone from them one last time and his ‘hero theme’ sounds an awful lot like ‘Dance of the Macra (Reprise)’ after several years away to fight more crabs, that feels disturbingly like someone’s messing with our own reality. As long as none of the characters are revealed to be a dream that’s actually something like an account manager for a perfume company…

Just because we’re told they look like something out of Alien, though, doesn’t mean we have to take something out of a dream’s word for it. Look at the Dream Crabs. Horrid scary alien egg-heads. Eggs? Doesn’t that make them a bit Easter? No. Focus. What is it that always comes back at Christmas to terrify everyone yet, like all good horror, exerts a strange fascination? Grey-green. Gnarled. Round.

They. Are. Sprouts.

“We know Dream Crabs are still on Earth.”
“There are lots of dangerous things on this funny little planet of yours, Clara, most of which you eat.”

6 – Clara gets some closure.

“Clara? Page number. Make it a good one.”
“Twelve.”

But not as much as you might expect.

This was, infamously, her last Christmas, the episode where she was going to go out, at last a Moffat-era companion letting go… Then going on, again. The touching last dream would have been a far better exit than she got, but I can’t begrudge it for all the marvellous moments she then got in between (before, at the last, being left dangling in between).

I loved the 2014 Doctor Who season – Season Thirty-Four or Series Eight, according to taste – and it’s by some way for me the best season since Steven Moffat took over. There are several reasons: Peter Capaldi being immediately marvellous as the Doctor; some terrific episodes from beginning to end (if not every single one in the middle); and Jenna Coleman and Clara suddenly becoming far more interesting. But no season’s perfect. It’s left dangling awkwardly for both the Doctor and Clara, and this Christmas special helps bring them both back together, telling the truth to each other at last, providing both an end to one strand of their relationship and the beginning of a better one.

That year was also defined by the other relationships for each of them. Two other people, neither quite in every story but both threaded throughout, both seeing themselves as the life partner of one of our heroes, both unable to see just why Clara or the Doctor didn’t fit in with exactly how they obviously ought to be, each finding ways to force them into the right shape. Missy is a terrible force for evil. Danny’s just a bit of a git. I found it much easier to enjoy Missy than Danny Pink. Perhaps this is because I enjoy a massive, deliciously evil villain, because I know where I stand with them, and so does everyone else watching, and so does the Doctor. But I’m not at all sure that the writers didn’t think Danny was a hero and a nice guy and a good catch, even as he bullied and blackmailed and controlled Clara in a very banally ordinary way and she went along with it. So one thing I like about Danny is that, here, he’s not that bad. Because he’s a dream. And Clara’s idealised version of him lets her let go. And she teeters, but decides to leave the dream of a nice Danny and live.

Besides, if Clara had left here we’d never have seen what a fantastic relationship she gets to have with Missy next time. Well, fantastic from Missy’s perspective, anyway. Maybe Thelma and Louise to Clara, Tom and Jerry to Missy. And totally exterminating hilarious. Plus (as – spoiler – she survived) – far healthier than the relationship with Mr Pink.

“VWORP VWORP”
“Oh, that noise! Never knew how much I loved it.”

7 – It’s a Moffat Selection Box.

What could be more Christmassy than being given the selection box, with just a little sweetie of each flavour, not enough to make you sick, or the greatest hits album, all the better tracks at single edit length so you don’t start skipping them?

Once upon a time, Steven Moffat was best-known as a sit-com writer with funny dialogue and intricate farce. He moved on to Doctor Who and became much better known for scary stories and intricate time-travel puzzles, and then for doing much of that over and again in several combinations. Last Christmas is a remarkable piece of television for several reasons, but one of the reasons that most appeals to me is that it presents some incredibly familiar Steven-Moffatiness and makes it fresh and likeable again. Perhaps because it’s all done in an hour. Perhaps because of the utter confidence it’s done with. But mostly, I think, because for the first time in his Doctor Who work, he rediscovers his sit-com roots not in the relationships but in the sheer blizzard of one-liners he lets loose. For all that this looks dark and has so much about death, at heart the story appeals to me because just this once Mr Moffat does funny again.

A perfect life for the straight couple, but it’s not real– today, in dreams. An everyday experience weaponised to make you neurotic – today, in dreams. And also, in ice cream! But which flavour Cornetto? A terrible scary new monster that you forget about or that appears when you think about it, and third go the Dream Sprouts are so much more fun and so much more horrible than the Silents, aren’t they? But new to Doctor Who, if not to Mr Moffat’s early work, Santa and the elves and zinger after zinger. It may not be quite the very best episode he’s written, but one especially good reason to watch it is if you want a story that shows off his writing to all his different strengths.

“The North Pole isn’t an actual pole.”
“Course it is. Look.”
“If it was an actual pole, it would not be stripy.”
“It’s got to be stripy.”
“Otherwise, you couldn’t see it moving round.”
“Mmm. It’s actually basic physics.”

Even the obligatory meta-reference to Doctor Who itself as a TV show and cultural phenomenon – well, one of them, anyway – is repurposed into a gag about some of the reaction to casting an older Doctor:

“Urrghh! …We’ve – we’ve got ghosts!”
“Ghosts?”
“Yeah – yeah – it’s a skeleton man and a girl in a nightie!”

8 – It’s beginning to look a lot like Troughton.

An isolated base, in the ice, a team of scientists, appalling monsters, in the darkness, laying siege… And even a Troughton! Since its return to TV in 2005, Doctor Who has intriguingly reimagined and borrowed from and made a total dog’s Christmas dinner of and hauled off the back of the lorry elements from all periods and formats of the series, but some writers have been more drawn to some histories than others. Russell T Davies was especially eclectic, but kept coming back to the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras, and to storylines from the Eighth Doctor novels; for Steven Moffat, there’s often a feeling of Patrick Troughton, perhaps with a dash of Sylvester McCoy (and the same Paul McGann novels lovingly ripped off).

Last Christmas both revels in and sends up the much-repeated Second Doctor trope of the ‘base under siege’, and does it brilliantly (so much so that when another one comes along in a couple of stories’ time it looks pre-ridiculed before we even have a chance to ridicule it on its own merits). That format is one reviewers particularly identify with Season Five of the show, and the season in which much of that Season took place was, as here, Winter. Michael Troughton makes his first appearance in TV Doctor Who – though he’s acted in Big Finish’s audio adventures – and as a “Professor”, one who even interacts with a TV screen in the way his father’s Doctor often did (though with less happy results). The Doctor tells everyone to run, and sets off with a moment of Chaplinesque physical awkwardness. Monsters rise from hospital beds, as they did in The Moonbase and Mr Moffat’s own The Empty Child – though what seems like a reference to the earlier story in Clara not in fact fetching a cup of tea for the Doctor seems to misunderstand what happened there with Polly and the coffee…




9 – But is it real?*

“You know what the big problem is in telling fantasy and reality apart?”
“What?”
“They’re both ridiculous.”

Yes, it’s another of those tales that asks about the nature of reality and dreams and layer upon layer – and both script and direction do all that rather well. There are very effective shocks as people wake up from one dream only into another, but there’s more to it than making you jump. Father Christmas gets to be a metaphor for both religion and the Doctor – is the Doctor now as much a part of Christmas as Santa? That’s what the BBC is banking on. And are either real? And does that matter? Why should you ever stop believing, if it widens your life and might help you escape from it? As is, my husband muses, especially if this is all the Doctor’s dream, Santa Claus yet another aspect of the Doctor? He even has a disguise that’s become a bit of a trademark. He even does the science bit. Until he’s told not to.

Santa gets to interrupt the opening titles – or at least Nick Frost does – after interrupting the previous story’s end titles by waking the Doctor to cheer him up and stop him leaving things badly with Clara. So perhaps it’s all a dream. But within this story, the Doctor and Clara do indeed start telling each other the truth. So isn’t it…?

*Technically, no. It’s a story. Shh.


10 – “Yippee ai-yay…!”

The story ends with a beautiful scene of the Doctor helping Santa deliver everyone the presence of themselves back home for Christmas, swooping about the landmarks of London and, in surprisingly un-Christmassy turn, not destroying any of them.

“Hey. You want to take the reins, Doctor?”
“You’re a dream construct. Currently representing either my recovering or expiring mind.”
“Yes, but – do you want a go?”
“Yeah. All right. …Look at me! I’m riding a sleigh. I’m riding a sleigh. Yippee ai-yay!”

The unfolding joy on the Doctor’s face is wondrous to behold. The sleigh taking everyone home at the end of what may be a dream recalls The Box of Delights. But the Doctor’s cry of delight always brings to mind something else for me, a metatextual reference that I can’t be certain isn’t deliberate.

At the time Peter Capaldi was announced as the new Doctor, he’d been a fantastic actor across many parts and several decades, but he’d become a household name for one role. Malcolm Tucker, the impossibly aggressive Labour spin doctor from political satire The Thick of It, the most explosively sweary man in the history of television and whose vocabulary is as far from the occasional gentle reference to the Doctor swearing in an obscure Martian dialect as could be. Months of hilarious redubbing of Doctor Who scenes with Tuckerisms spread across YouTube (no, really, some were funny, but definitely not for parents). Because of course the Doctor would never, ever say such things.

Yet every time I watch Peter Capaldi dashing through the sky, it is impossible to expunge from my brain a bit of Tucker as his line continues into the famous seasonal benediction from that most wholesome of family Christmas movies, Die Hard:

“Yippee ki yay, mo—”

[Hurriedly queue theme from Blackadder’s Christmas Carol]

What Else Should I Tell You About Last Christmas?

Spoilers – in more than one sense – because there’s always someone at the big family Christmas dinner who says something that makes you wince and wonder what decade they’re living in. I like several of the women characters here, and that there are several women characters here. The only person who doesn’t get much of a character and ends up dead is (spoilers) the only man on the base. So far, so feminist. Except that… The first time I watched Last Christmas, I was appreciating the mix of ages and characters among the women scientists, and then remember suddenly shouting some Tuckerism as the rug was suddenly pulled.

Taking the mickey out of Troughton is one thing. But one of the problems with Second Doctor stories set in isolated bases with teams of scientists is that, while the teams were usually quite diverse in terms of nationality and even race, they tended all to be men. By the end, the Doctor’s “You don’t seem much like a scientist” turns queasily from a slightly crass line to something queasily like sexual determinism. When people say ‘You don’t look like a scientist / footballer / President’ to a woman, it tends not to be because it’s that particular woman.

“I thought I was a scientist. That’s rubbish.”
“Finally, something that makes sense.”

It turns out that the base under siege isn’t real. But of course neither is the idea of a woman scientist. And because, in retrospect, the only one of the team we don’t find out is not a scientist is the man (even though it’s probably because he doesn’t survive long enough for us to see his real life). Which leaves an awkward feeling that, in all the silly dream of Troughton bases, the only bit that these bases got right is that it’s a silly dream to imagine there could have been any female scientists in them.

Then there’s the Doctor’s line about “texting women of low moral character”. Yes, it’s something to wind Clara up, deliberately. But it’s rather like the Doctor being appalled at a man’s internet browsing history and telling him to get a girlfriend back in The Eleventh Hour. In almost every other writer’s hands, the Doctor encourages difference and making your own mind up, and is more often than not a little baffled by other people’s sexuality, but never judgmental. I think Mr Moffat tries. I really do. And he often gets it right. But so often his Doctor just sounds like he’s telling everyone not to find their own way of life, but to follow the one that Mr Moffat has simply found is the best, so why wouldn’t you? It’s not heteronormativity: it’s just his normativity. And anyone who thinks that’s the point of Doctor Who is for me missing the point by so far I can barely countenance it.

But then there’s the Doctor’s relationship with Clara, which doesn’t feel like that at all, and which seems to me that Mr Moffat has really thought about – not least the way the Doctor’s mean when he tries to be kind and kind when he tries to be mean about her, especially her face. One of the reasons I think that scene near the surface of the sea of dreams would have made such an appropriate exit for Clara is that he’s always seen her with a different eye, and even here he still can’t tell how old she is or how to judge her ‘looks’, and that she doesn’t care either.

And, if you need one, my score:

8/10

If You Like Last Christmas, Why Not Try…

The Return of Doctor Mysterio, on BBC1 (or wherever you are) today at 17.45! It’s Christmas. There’s a Christmas special. I know next to nothing about it. Yippee ai-yay!

The Unquiet Dead. Doctor Who’s Christmas special from April 2005, before they knew the series would be a big enough hit to survive, let alone become a shining Christmas BBC star. Simon Callow is Charles Dickens. The yellow and blue gaslight glow suffusing the whole thing makes it an exceptionally beautiful piece of television. And it received just about the single best review Doctor Who has had in its entire history (as well as one pointing out a problem with its ‘no room at the inn’ attitude that you may have to search harder for).

And from actual last Christmas, a rather fun piece of new Doctor Who for Christmas 2015, where the Twelfth Doctor starts off on his own and is joined in an unexpected guest turn by everyone’s favourite time-travelling archaeologist, someone who’s been a big part in and out of the Doctor’s past, introducing herself with one of my favourite ever Doctor Who multiple-meaning in-joke lines, I recommend…

Big Bang Generation, by Gary Russell, available in all good bookshops.

And The Husbands of River Song is quite entertaining, too. It does, as my husband points out, have rather more decapitations than most screwball comedies, but’s it probably my favourite adventure with River Song. I’m ever so glad I’m Richard’s husband instead, though.

Next Time…

I’ve had to make my series travel in time to write this for Christmas, so once again next time, or previously if you’re pedantically reading them in order (I so hope you do, I’m an appalling pedant and it would make my Christmas): The next tale I have planned is a heart-warming nativity story… And there’s still no such thing as a final evolutionary form, but who’s going to tell them that?

Or, properly… An older and much younger Doctor discovers joy again in one of the series’ most Dickensian tales with absolutely no questions of whether any monsters or people are real.

Labels: Christmas, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 52, Last Christmas, Patrick Troughton, Peter Capaldi, Steven Moffat

Last Saturday evening a new Doctor landed on BBC1, causing even his friends to wonder if they knew who he was any more. That’ll be doubly unnerving if you’re coming to the Doctor and the series for the first time. But don’t worry. It’s only as complicated as you want to make it. There’s really very little you need to know – and the easiest way to find out is to watch an episode of Doctor Who. But here’s a simple start…

What Do You Need To Know About Doctor Who?

The Doctor is a traveller in time and space. He goes anywhere he likes, from Earth’s past, present and future to alien worlds and stranger places still. He respects life rather than authority, and obeys no-one else’s rules. He lives by his own joy in exploring new places and times, and by his own moral sense to fight oppression. He prefers to use his intelligence rather than violence, and he takes friends with him to explore the wonders of the Universe.

That’s it.

OK, so that’s the important bit, but if you want answers to a few more questions, take a look at the headlines below and read the bits that you want to know about. Or you could just get on and watch an episode.

The Doctor – Who Is He? Why Does He Travel?

He’s an alien, from a world whose rigidly authoritarian rulers watched over all of time and space – but without interfering. He found that just watching and keeping everything the same bored him, when he wanted to get out to meet people and experience things for himself. So he took a TARDIS and the name “the Doctor” and left.

The TARDIS – the Doctor’s Time-ship

A TARDIS is a machine (or a place, or an event) for travelling through time and space, the name standing for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. The Doctor’s TARDIS was a bit old and unreliable back when he borrowed it from his people, and he’s patched it up and customised it many times in the perhaps a couple of thousand years that they’ve been travelling together. Just to make it even less likely it’ll go where he wants it to (but more likely to go where he needs it to), it’s quite literally got a mind of its own, too. It moves seemingly by vanishing from one place, then just appearing in the next, travelling not through ordinary space but a strange space-time vortex.

The other big thing about the TARDIS is that its outside gives no sign of what’s inside. It used to disguise itself on landing so it wouldn’t be spotted, but when the Doctor arrived in the 1960s it got stuck on taking the form of a police box, a sort of dedicated phone booth before handy mobile communications. Inside, though, unfolds into many other dimensions and many different rooms. You’ll have noticed that it’s bigger inside than outside, then. So do most people who go in (unsurprisingly). And while the old blue exterior is pretty much a constant, from time to time the interior changes its style, colour, shape and tone, while keeping its essential character. Much like its pilot does…

The Daleks – and Why the Doctor Fights Them

Once he started travelling, the Doctor found that that the more experience he had of other people and places, the more he wanted to get involved, because the more he saw the urge to dominate others the more he wanted to stand up to it. He’s opposed bullies, tyrants and monsters from many alien races – and from his own, and from ours – but one enemy always comes back.

Those he’s fought most often in their endless campaign to dominate and exterminate without question are the Daleks, alien conquerors in armoured mini-tanks with a hatred for all other races. They’re the ultimate dictators, the opposite of the Doctor’s own desire for freedom.

The Daleks too developed time travel, leading to a cataclysmic Time War with the Doctor’s own people – which is a history so complicated that no-one has a full answer. But by the end of it, the Doctor seemed the only one left, so he just carries on travelling, making the most of life, seeing the sights, toppling empires, that sort of thing. And if that sounds like a dangerous lifestyle, it’s often been fatal…

How the Doctor Changes

The Doctor’s people were each remarkably long-lived, so that helps more than moisturiser. But it’s not just that their bodies live for many hundreds of years. When they get too old, or are fatally injured, they’ve got a way of cheating death. At what would be the final moment, their body is reborn into a completely new one, giving them a new lease of life, shaking up their personality while remaining essentially the same person underneath. The Doctor’s had quite an eventful life, and the most recent body he’s been ‘born’ into is his… Well, it’s easiest to say it’s his twelfth.

How Old? How Many Bodies? …No, Nobody Else Really Knows Either

Some people might tell you that the Doctor is now in his thirteenth, fifteenth or twenty-third body, and they’ll all be right, but just as with the Time War, no-one has a precise answer and it makes no difference to the story. Similarly, while the Doctor is as a rule honest, he’s at best a little confused over his precise age. Perhaps on occasion he’s dropped a few hundred years or so for vanity’s sake (my money’s on the one in the leather jacket having a mid-lives crisis). But like his precise number of bodies, the Doctor’s exact age isn’t something we need to know – just as well, really, as we’re never going to. Just nod sagely and say, ‘Ah, well, things got complicated in the Time War,’ because if time was getting messed up to that extent by rival peoples each with the power to control it, things were bound to, weren’t they?

These disconcerting rebirths also help Doctor Who the series carry on when the actor playing the Doctor decides to leave, making it almost the only TV show that can recast its lead without hoping the audience are watching TV with the picture turned off or pretending it’s something to do with plastic surgery or showers. The latest actor to play the Doctor is Peter Capaldi.

What’s Special About Doctor Who?

The TV series Doctor Who began broadcast in 1963, starring William Hartnell as the Doctor (the first three stories are available in the DVD box set Doctor Who – The Beginning). It ran continuously for more than a quarter of a century, making it the longest-running science fiction series in the world and inspiring an awful lot of people. Kept alive in books, audio plays and millions of imaginations, the TV version was reborn in 2005 and has again been a popular and critical success thanks to its sheer joy, its unique flexibility and, of course, to monsters like the Daleks. A bonus to the series always reinventing itself is that you don’t need to know any intricate details, ongoing plots or characters to follow it. Even the most involved elements change and get left behind (or even undone); happily, many of the best writers assume that every episode is someone’s first, and even if some are tempted to make no concessions to the viewer, the very variety of the series stops it ever becoming too impenetrable.

It’s one bold central idea that’s important and that runs through now more than half a century of adventures. With Doctor Who, you can go pretty much anywhere and do pretty much anything, and always see that people everywhere are worthwhile, whether they’re people like us or green scaly rubber people. The Doctor believes in freedom, and hates ignorance, conformity and insularity. He doesn’t work for anyone, wear a uniform or carry a gun, making the series both very British and very anti-establishment.

Doctor Who encourages people to think, to have fun, and to take a moral stand, but it’s wary of solving problems by shooting them. You don’t have to believe what you’re told, still less do what you’re told. And it’s spent several decades scaring children with nasty monsters, eerie places and even the music, which when you put it all together is what family entertainment is about – a show with enough in it to satisfy all ages, from action to excite the adults to sharp questions to keep the children intrigued. That’s how down the years it’s inspired spin-offs from novels to comics, from Torchwood to The Sarah Jane Adventures and many more.

The best of Doctor Who would include a dash of horror, adventures in history, enough wit to make you smile, enough ideas and strangeness and to make you think, and enough action to get you excited. That’s probably too much to fit into just one piece of television, which takes you right back to the idea that you can go anywhere and do anything, because it’s not about just one piece of television, but different travels. Like the TARDIS, Doctor Who is bigger on the inside. It’s the only show where, if you don’t like where it’s ended up one week, if you want it to be scarier, or funnier, or more thoughtful, or more action-packed, the next week will be in a completely different place and time and probably in a completely different style, but still recognisably the same programme.

That’s probably why I fell in love with it, anyway.

How Can You Find Out More?

You can read more on this blog (and my occasionally updated others) and any of my terrifyingly in-depth Doctor Who articles that take your fancy, or there are at least hundreds of thousands of other web pages, books and learned articles (though, obviously, I don’t think they’ll be as good. As with everything else about Doctor Who, your tastes may vary).

But I wouldn’t just read, if I were you. Doctor Who is probably the best TV programme ever made, so the best way to find about it is just to watch it. Take a Deep Breath and plunge in.

The new series started on BBC1 and on many other TV channels around the world last Saturday. Tune in every Saturday evening for the next three months to see more of it unfolding, brand new, that you know as much about as I do, with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor and whatever friends and foes there are to come. If you missed the first episode and are in the UK, it’s free on air this Friday (and doubtless many more times) on BBC3 and at times of your own choosing on BBC iPlayer.

Or you can choose older stories in a multitude of formats – aside from the books and comics and CDs, you can find pretty much every single episode of the TV series on DVD and other formats, broadcasts, downloads and online (some of the latter even free and legal).

If you do want more than the new stories to warm your darkening Autumn nights but the incredible range of choice is bewildering, here are two suggestions that might help in your selection. Ready?

The Twelve-ish Faces of Doctor Who

It’s now a few days after the full-length debut of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor. Back in 2010, a few days before the full-length debut of his predecessor Matt Smith, I published my pick of “The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who” – one story for each Doctor, to introduce them all. Or, rather, two sets of one for each Doctor, one my pick of more populist stories (or as mainstream as Doctor Who gets), the other of stranger or more thoughtful tales. They’re all easily available on DVD, with several in other formats as well.

Click here to look at both lists and see if anything takes your fancy. Then watch one.

They’re a good set of introductions for each of the other Doctors so far – except one. Four years later, there is of course a big addition to make.

To celebrate the full Matt Smith, his Doctor deserves a full story too. My lovely Richard and I are in the middle of rewatching all his adventures, and though they’ve still not settled in enough for me to divide them into populist and strange, here are some particular favourites of mine from his era:

• Amy’s Choice – a brilliant sci-fi short story, and almost Matt Smith’s era in a nutshell
  

• The Doctor’s Wife – dark, strange and moving
  

• The Crimson Horror – and this Victorian horror story makes me laugh.

Plus

• The Day of the Doctor – the Fiftieth Anniversary special, starring three Doctors and featuring a great many more.

Then choose your own Peter Capaldi story, because right now I’ve not seen those yet either!

Or perhaps, rather than the hero in his many faces, you want to get into the Daleks. If so, here’s another article I’ve prepared earlier in which I explain who and what they are and give a rough idea of what I think of their stories so far.

Tune In To #WHOonHorror

If you’re in the UK and your TV can receive the Horror Channel, you’re in luck. Several months ago, the Horror Channel bought the rights to show thirty different Doctor Who stories – at least two from each of the first seven Doctors.

So my advice is, again, to turn on your telly (or other device) and watch one.

Apparently their Doctor Who selection has been doing very well for the channel’s ratings, so with luck they’ll still be showing them in their two-episodes-daily run for some time to come. Besides, who knows? They’ve been quite a success, so they might decide to get hold of more stories to show. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve made an excellent set of choices so far. The thirty Horror Channel Doctor Who stories include fifteen that I’d give nine or ten out of ten to – and just five I’d score lower than five out of ten. I’m not going to give you a great long list of them all my own order of preference, though, because there’s something good about all of them and everyone’s tastes vary.

But if you want to look out for my particular favourites, these get my personal ten out of ten:

• The Deadly Assassin
  

• The Talons of Weng-Chiang
  

• The Curse of Fenric
  

• Genesis of the Daleks
  

• The Mind Robber
  

• The Caves of Androzani
  

• An Unearthly Child

They may or may not be great introductions to the series, but I love each of them especially, and if you happen to catch them on #WHOonHorror I can guarantee there’ll be something to entertain, amuse, scare, intrigue or offend. I just can’t guarantee which will apply to you. And if none of them happen to be scheduled for a repeat in the next few weeks, just try your luck and start with whichever one’s on!

What Doctor Who People Say About Doctor Who

This is the third edition of an article I originally wrote in 2006 to introduce that year’s new series. Version one and version two are pretty much the same as each other; this time it’s more of a regeneration. Of my other Doctor Who writing, some of my favourite – and more bite-sized – pieces I’ve written to illustrate why Doctor Who is brilliant are a selection of great scenes and what makes them marvellous. These might be easier to take in than writing about a whole story at once. In theory there are going to be fifty of them eventually, but I’ve not quite got that far yet. Still, click here for my slowly growing Doctor Who 50 Great Scenes and choose one at random.

If you want a different perspective from mine, should you have a device that can read the Radio Times App, this week’s issue (search for 23-29 August 2014) has a particularly special free gift. As well as having Peter Capaldi on the cover and several articles introducing the new series, the electronic version includes the Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special from 1973. I was given a tattered old second-hand copy when I was a small boy and loved it dearly, and I still think it’s one of the most gorgeous Doctor Who magazines that’s ever been published. It’s fun and it’s now free in electronic form with the ordinary issue, so I recommend it.


And finally, for another change from me, here’s what some of the most important creative talents behind the series in past and present have to say about Doctor Who:

Russell T Davies, Doctor Who lead writer for the 2005 relaunch and through the 2000s:

“Doctor Who is the best idea ever invented in the history of the world.”

Peter Capaldi, the new Doctor:

“You should watch it if you want to nourish your heart and your soul – and if you want to be scared.”

Jenna Coleman, the Doctor’s friend and current travelling companion, Clara:

“If you like adventure, if you want to imagine that you could go anywhere in space and time – what would you do? Where would you go? It’s just a show full of infinite, infinite possibilities.”

Steven Moffat, current Doctor Who lead writer:

“Doctor Who is about a man who can travel anywhere in time and space in a box that’s bigger on the inside.”

Verity Lambert, Doctor Who founding producer from 1963 to the mid-1960s:

“He embodied the utmost complexity – he was sometimes dangerous or unpleasant, sometimes kind, sometimes foolish, but most importantly he was never a member of the establishment. He was always an outsider.”

Terrance Dicks, Doctor Who lead writer during the early 1970s and author of more Doctor Who books than anyone else:

“Much has changed about the Doctor over the years but much has remained the same. Despite the superficial differences in appearance, at heart, or rather at hearts (the Doctor has two) his character is remarkably consistent.
“He is still impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He still hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him.
“The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly.
“In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around.”

Robert Holmes, Doctor Who lead writer during the mid-1970s (and so the man who got me hooked, got me into politics and got me the man I love):

“Let’s frighten the little buggers to death!”

So why don’t you turn off my web page and go and watch a more interesting Doctor Who television programme instead?

Labels: Daleks, Doctor Who, Peter Capaldi, Top Tips, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

Will Peter Capaldi know how to fly the TARDIS in an hour’s time? Take a Deep Breath!

We’re thrilled looking forward to the new Doctor, and an old monster. Sixty-seven million years old (today).




It’s not the first time dinosaurs have savaged London (and I’m not talking Boris vs Ken). Doctor Who history includes the 1974 story Invasion of the Dinosaurs, featuring Jon Pertwee and, as I’ve written before… Some problems. But it also boasts one of the most fabulous book covers (and onomatopoeic effects) ever devised.

Doctor Who: The New Adventures – Blood Heat is a more thrilling if more obscure 1993 story published as part of the brilliant continuing book range that kept the series and Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor alive in the 1990s. It even features Silurians, too! But the cover of Jim Mortimore’s novel, while thrilling, isn’t quite as awesome as that of Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation from 1976. So I’ve drawn a very subtle bonus feature to fix that. I think you’ll agree it was just what it needed.




I don’t know what tonight’s story will bring us, aside of course from another Tyrannosaur in the capital and a Doctor who’s at last not hiding his age, but I hope it’ll be every bit as exciting as its two predecessors. Now all they need is to commission a book version and a proper painted cover – both Chris Achilleos and Jeff Cummins are still around. There’s only one way to decide which… FIGHT!

KKLAK!

RROAR!

VWORP VWORP!

See it in an hour.

Labels: Blood Heat, Books, Deep Breath, Dinosaurs, Doctor Who, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Jon Pertwee, London, New Adventures, Peter Capaldi, Pictures, Sylvester McCoy

Have you heard the Doctor Who adventure with the future Time Lord from The Thick of It? Not that one – the other one. Alex MacQueen stars in UNIT: Dominion as the Other Doctor, alongside Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Tracey Childs as fabulous antihero Elizabeth Klein – sometime companion, sometime scientist from an alternate Nazi future. Available in boxed set or download from Big Finish, this is an epic audio drama, not unlike a movie remake of Doctor Who (but which?), and the threat of total dimensional chaos has been cheering me up today.

“Ahhh, the giddy joy.”

I have had an unremittingly crapulent day. Booked to go to a one-day Doctor Who event from Fantom Films, I’ve been horribly ill all the way throughout the night and from dawn to dusk, so I’ve missed out on seventh Doctor-themed excitement and meeting the likes of Lisa Bowerman (Professor Bernice Summerfield), Tracey Childs and Sylvester McCoy. However, having spent much of August catching up with a ton of Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio plays from several years, and particularly those featuring Sylvester – including twenty-six in a fortnight of an especially fine story arc of A Death in the Family and Gods and Monsters – I’ve turned to a special release (and much chocolate) to winch my spirits off the floor. Spoilers follow…

Dr Elizabeth Klein (Take I)

Readers familiar with Big Finish’s CDs or who listen to Radio 4 Extra will have a head start for Elizabeth Klein, the BBC station having broadcast a trilogy of her stories with (or against) the Doctor. There’s more to hear in the Big Finish originals, as well as the story from, goodness me, twelve years ago now that set the whole thing off: Doctor Who – Colditz. In 2001 it seemed a relatively average historical adventure for the Doctor and Ace, but with a twist, and slightly let down by being one of the few Big Finishes where something went wrong in the production (bits sound like they’re recorded in a tin can), it was always a decent enough tale, with the main thing I remembered from it at the time being Klein, an interesting character and concept: when the Doctor and Ace accidentally change history, she’s the dedicated scientist who travels back from the future Nazi timeline they created… And is stranded in our world, determined to single-handedly restore what to her is the ‘real’ history. Clearly, though, only a twist in the story and a loose end they’d never return to. These days, Colditz stands out in story terms as the first Doctor Who to feature the much more substantial figure of Klein – and in production terms as the first Doctor Who to feature the even more substantial figure of David Tennant, though here playing a villain and not another Doctor. And, shh, Tracey Childs’ cold intelligence and charisma made more of an impression then than David’s bullying Nazi…

Tracey Childs later appeared with David Tennant’s Doctor on television, too, in the fantastic The Fires of Pompeii. Colditz was about a future timeline coming back to see you unexpectedly – where Tracey Childs co-starred with David Tennant, the next Doctor but one. The Fires of Pompeii was about predictions of the future – where Tracey Childs co-starred with Peter Capaldi, the next Doctor but one. Keep an eye on her co-stars, that’s all I’m saying. And listen if she suggests you cross her palm with silver.

When Big Finish eventually asked Tracey Childs to return nearly nine years later, they’d put a lot of work into making Klein’s story something special, though, and it shows (not least in the fabulous, furious vignette of that name). A Thousand Tiny Wings reintroduces Klein in 1950s Kenya, never able to go home, with sweltering heat, terrific characterisation and never quite being sure where you stand with anyone. Survival of the Fittest is better still, with both Klein’s point of view and the alien culture well-sketched, building to a great ending. She’s a match for him. The only shame is that there’s only one story with the original Klein as the Doctor’s ‘companion’, as their mutual talent, strong convictions and tendency to knock sparks off each other was something I’d’ve liked to have heard more of. But, no, there’s no time to get comfortable: for both of them, the story drives on into The Architects of History. In this ‘Fall and De-Klein’, not only are a quiet, dangerous Sylvester and a ruthless Tracey clamping down on her underlying despair both terrific, but we even get another companion for the Doctor, in Being Human’s Lenora Crichlow. It’s easy for stories in which time is rewritten to unravel, either shooting up themselves or becoming merely pointless, but this pulls it off in making the events matter by nailing them to the effects on the people involved. There’s just a hint of the subtext of the Doctor as Nazi-hunter and who the looming Nuremberg would be – then I surprised myself by getting a little misty-eyed at the shot at redemption.

Big Finish is in the middle of releasing a new trilogy starring the seventh Doctor and Klein – Persuasion, Starlight Robbery and Daleks Among Us – with the alternative, rewritten re-Klein who doesn’t hail from the Nazi universe; Richard and I are waiting to listen to them all together. But in between the two trilogies, Big Finish last year brought out a new development for the DVD season box age, not monthly single releases but a boxed set containing one big story. UNIT: Dominion isn’t just the Doctor re-united / starting off with a new Klein, but a story so big it has another companion (or more) and an Other Doctor, too. Plus the title protagonists in UNIT, the UN-run special services that sometimes work with the Doctor. The story works better for some of its five competing leads than for others…

UNIT: Dominion – An Epic That Delivers

UNIT: Dominion is something of an epic. It sounds much more visual, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, than most Big Finish plays, and in a boxed set of four hour-long episodes (plus a ‘making of’) it runs to a fairly epic length as well. But while the extraordinary sound design and cast grab your attention, I’d give the strongest praise to the writers Nicholas Briggs and Jason Arnopp: it’s generally a strong story, though as ever I can find flaws along the way, but what’s really impressive about it is that they manage to keep it all together: a four-hour disaster movie teeming with different characters, locations and extradimensional beings could very easily have descended either into incomprehensible mulch or constantly had to stop for the forced dialogue of ‘Look, Doctor, at that [four lines of description] doing that terrible [four more lines of description]!’ Instead, they take a story that seems not at all suited to the intimacy of the audio play and make it work.

There will be spoilers, so I’ll tell you now that UNIT: Dominion is fun, and huge, and in quite a few ways, not what I was expecting – though predictably with Klein and the Other Doctor stealing much of it. I recommend it. But be careful reading on, as the further you get towards the end, the more spoilertastic detail there’ll be.

The first episode is the best, with lots of new ideas; the second’s the weirdest, mainly everyone caught with different extradimensional ooglies which have the feel of very early Twentieth Century weird sci-fi (but Mind Leeches, Skyheads and lava spiders work as terms that instantly sketch in the sort of thing they are), with Sylv entirely sidelined; the third is the most disturbing, as Sylv gets back into the story but someone else forces everyone’s hands; and the fourth, the several big finishes, including shocking codas and Klein’s second and so slightly less effective ‘happy ending’ that sets her up for the new trilogy.

With the Doctor, the Other Doctor, Klein, Raine and UNIT all vying for attention, and four hours for them to play in, there are large stretches for which different ‘lead’ characters are to the fore and others disappear into the background. So which of the five potential protagonists make it?

The Doctor

Sylvester McCoy is the Doctor, and marvellous he is, too. It’s always a pleasure to hear him back again, particularly now he’s a big movie star: in a curious way, he’s one of the actors who always feels most like the Doctor, in his case I suspect because the New Adventures gave him such a long and compelling reign, the actor always in my head even when he wasn’t actually in employment for the role. It’s even true that, while if asked to pick out my favourite arrangements of the Doctor Who Theme Keff McCulloch’s would not be near the top of the pile, Sylvester remained the Doctor throughout such an influential part of my life that his Theme always gives me the shivers when I hear it from Big Finish, far more than others that my head says I prefer.

This time the Doctor – the seventh Doctor – gets his best material in the opening and closing episodes of the story, as the relationship between him and the Other Doctor is so incendiary that they can’t be together too often. That means the one we know is not so much sidelined as stranded in a different dimension and almost a different story. This inevitably means he’s a smaller presence for much of the story, which makes you appreciate him all the more when he breaks back into the narrative – and he finds a terrific resolution in the finale. Along the way, Sylvester rises to some great material, and while the ‘main story’ feels like a major reimagining of one old story in particular, there are subtler echoes of many other stories in this Doctor’s scenes in particular. Like Big Finish’s Project Lazarus, it dodges around making this a ‘two Doctors story’ by mostly keeping them apart and separating the Doctor, too, from the suspicious scientific-military organisation. There’s a hint of Russell T Davies’ early story Damaged Goods in Sylv as sinister Umbrella Man, and of Russell’s late story The Stolen Earth in Ace’s flickering cameo warning messages and all realities breaking down (the idea of Ace being on Gallifrey also having their cake and eating it as regards the Lost Stories, and yet more of the Time Lords’ sinister secrets, if not the Othering Other himself).

There are a few weak points in the treatment of the Doctor too, though; not so much all the time when he’s not in the loop, but the elements where he’s rather behind the audience in working things out, and most of all the weirdly out-of-character moments where he of all Doctors goes on and on about how would never interfere in his own time stream. It’s one of the script’s few jarring failings that, given one of the more complex and morally ambiguous Doctors to set against the Other Doctor, rather than comparing their different attitudes to interference and ruthlessness and using each to illuminate the other, it bottles the difficult questions and – despite Klein’s fear of him – leaves the Doctor a bit… Vanilla. Still, particularly if you can ignore the awkwardly inserted denials of his own methods, the contrast between the master manipulator who keeps everything broodily close to his chest and the swaggering extrovert Other Doctor who knows more than he does is very entertaining (as MacQueen does unto McCoy as McCoy did unto Davison in Cold Fusion). No wonder Sylv’s Doctor follows several other Doctor-Doctor clashes and detests him on sight.

Dr Elizabeth Klein (Take II)

Even though we knew a very different her, at times it seems as if Klein is the only person we know. The Other Klein was raised in a Nazi state and, for all her intelligence, drive and other admirable qualities was ideologically a true believer, the spark for a terrific battle of wills with the Doctor; there was a real danger that this one would seem like she’d been, well, doctored. Fortunately, she’s well enough written to still give her an edge, Tracey Childs is still outstanding, and perhaps most calculatingly she’s put in a position where she has good reason to be deeply suspicious of the Doctor – Sylvester’s in particular. That means that when she’s thrown together with the Other Doctor, while inevitably he steals quite a bit from her, they have a much more interesting if hardly trusting relationship: with her as the brilliant UNIT Scientific Advisor Dr Liz and him an unknown but rather flamboyant quality, it deliberately evokes the abrasive but fabulous rapport between Dr Liz [fascist in an alternate reality] Shaw and Jon Pertwee’s Doctor in the ’70s. Of her colleagues at UNIT, though, there’s much less to be said: they’re far more suspicious of the Doctor, with far less reason, and though in theory you’d expect there to be five competitors for the position of protagonist, with UNIT a better bet than most for having the title, they’re not up to it. Colonel Lafayette is just a comic relief idiot to be killed; Major Wyland-Jones just a cartoon brute. So of all the things UNIT: Dominion works as, a UNIT story isn’t one of them. It’s far less the second series of a new UNIT than a relaunch for Klein, and for someone else, too…

Raine Kreevey

Beth Chalmers’ Raine Kreevey is the Doctor’s travelling companion here. Introduced in a recent series of Big Finish Lost Stories based on scripts that might have gone into TV production had Doctor Who not been cancelled in 1989, her character’s still rather battling to make an impression on me. In part, it’s because she’s not really yet had a story in which she and Sylvester McCoy are the only leads; in part, it’s because Beth Chalmers sounds a bit like Sylv’s earliest companion Bonnie Langford, which makes her less distinctive. Her most notable character trait is that she’s a top thief, giving the Doctor a scene in which he hypnotises her to do some mental safecracking to get out of a dimensional corridor. But even that’s less about her than an illustration of this Doctor’s similarities with the Other Doctor, who also makes much use of hypnosis – though given that the Other Doctor’s hypnosis leads people to box their personalities into safes, it suggests that for all they have in common they have diametrically opposite attitudes about control. Unfortunately for Raine, she’s just nowhere near as interesting as Klein, with whom she comes across as remarkably crass, and not only does she have to compete with all the other four protagonists, but Sylvester’s long-term companion Ace is more immediately memorable in just a distorted cameo.

I’ve said there are spoilers. Last chance, all right?

The Other Doctor

Of the four leads, the anticipation for the Other Doctor has to be the greatest, and Alex MacQueen is hugely enjoyable playing the role. The Doctor he most seems to have modelled himself on is Jon Pertwee, flamboyant, compelling, know-it-all and sometimes a bit of a shit. There’s also more than a touch of another Doctor quite appropriate to a Nicholas Briggs production, but more of that laters.

Puzzling out the character of the Other Doctor, inevitably he called to mind Sylvester’s story Battlefield, in which the master manipulator is manipulated in turn by another Doctor who knows more than he does – like the Other Doctor, identified as a future Doctor but feeling rather more like an alternative. I got a heavy hint of David Collings, too, though, an actor who’s twice played an ‘Other Doctor’. A Doctor who’s forgotten all the details sounded very much like Mawdryn Undead, deeply suspicious from the first, even hinting he might be something like the 517th. And that made me wonder about Big Finish’s own Unbound Doctor story Full Fathom Five, pushing harder at the idea of a Doctor who’s decided that the end can justify the means. Which in turn reminded of that other Doctor Who Unbound story Sympathy For the Devil… Doesn’t this Doctor seem fond of hypnotism – even if we have Sylv doing the same, it’s not to the same extent, and why do we cut away before the words we hear him use…? And why is he so keen to have a set of hypnotised soldiers he can deploy, and then tell Klein he’s abandoned not using guns and killing, while she’s contemptuous of his swimming off to save himself and leave soldiers to die…?

By this point you will have worked out what I worked out long before the Part Three cliffhanger, but while that episode finale wasn’t much of a surprise it was immensely satisfying. The Other Doctor has apparently betrayed UNIT, but as they shoot at him at the drop of a hat you can hardly blame him; the Doctor dives after him into his TARDIS, only to find that he’s not betrayed UNIT after all – that is, not in the way they all think, though answering the accusation that he was going to let them all die with “Tempting, but no” may not be the most reassuring of denials – but that for all its battered police box exterior, the ‘upgraded’ inside is very swish indeed, and just not his TARDIS at all. For all his flamboyance, in this – predictable as ever, but my favourite – scene MacQueen has three little moments where he’s simply at his finest, and they’re all suddenly dialled right down. Two of them are so underplayed that they’re almost subliminal: listen to this while pottering about or doing the dishes and you’ll miss them. While the Doctor is asking so many irritating questions, there’s just a tiny breath of a Muttley laugh; then, as the Doctor realises “You – you’re not me…” the weight of acting up comes off the Other Doctor’s shoulder and “What a relief…” comes out in the tiniest sigh; and while on their meeting in Part One he immediately got the Doctor’s back up with his braying “Hello, you!” and “Laters!” now the Doctor finally recognises the Master he gives a quiet, poisonous and quite brilliantly delivered “Hello, you” to make the spine chill as the music cuts in.

It’s not just that Richard and I keep trying to emulate that intonation when one of us answers the phone to the other, but that now there are two future Time Lords already cast as rivals in The Thick of It, we keep taking our leave of each other with a “Laters!” and a “Fuckettiebye.”

I’ve written before that it was in Sympathy For the Devil that Big Finish previously presented their new casting of the Master – and if you don’t know who he is, I’ve introduced each of his TV incarnations here – and though both of them and both stories are terrific (one actor slightly more here, one story slightly more there), the ‘shock reveal’ nature of each does make them difficult to talk about for fear of spoilers. You’re here now, though. If there’s one little bit of dissatisfaction with Alex MacQueen’s fabulous double portrayal, it’s that although at the reveal he gives a tour de force outmanoeuvring the Doctor from bellowing to near-imperceptible, I was rather surprised to find that his theatrical Doctor impression wasn’t really toned down very much once he was himself, despite an excuse for once for the Master to be the less camp and hammy one. Perhaps it’s just that, as Klein says (and as other Masters had previously proved), he’s envious and loved being the Doctor just a bit too much. And on top of the grandstanding Pertwee affectations (the Doctor seen most as the Master’s other half), the Other Doctor reminded me very strongly of Nicholas Briggs’ incarnation [see below], only with a little more domination and a little less tea. Is it the baldness that brings out that very specific sort of jollity in the Doctor, or just Nicholas Briggs naturally thinking, ‘Now, how would I characterise an Other Doctor…?’

Doctor Who – The Movie Remake

“I made my TARDIS look like yours because I needed everyone to think I was you…”

The biggest single echo of other Doctors in the story is, not unexpectedly after all that, a Pertwee one, too. If UNIT: Dominion is like a Doctor Who movie for audio, it’s almost explicitly like a movie version of 1971’s The Claws of Axos. I don’t mean that as a complaint: this story is far better than The Claws of Axos, and doesn’t just show how you might reimagine an old story on a ‘movie budget’ but how you can take relatively unpromising material and do amazing things with it. If Nick Briggs and Jason Arnopp did take that story as part of their inspiration, their homage to it turns everything about it around. The big flying Sky Heads from the original script are surprisingly friendly, and have fantastically massive voices… The power drain nodes are this time draining the weak aliens who say ‘Help us’ and then turn nasty… The Master again does a brilliant turn as UNIT’s scientific advisor, but it’s UNIT rather than Axos who are blackmailing him by refusing to let him get his TARDIS back… Perhaps most strikingly, at the root of the whole plot is an element that’s always been part of the Master, at its height on TV in The Deadly Assassin but framed here in an especially The Claws of Axos way: the Master hates the Doctor so much that killing him would never be enough, so he wants to humiliate him and destroy what he stands for first. In the 1971 story, the Doctor’s own a short-lived bluff made himself seem like a git who’s flying off to leave everyone to die, but here the Master takes the same idea and (at several points literally) flies with it. Death’s too good for the Doctor; humiliation alone isn’t enough; even endless subservience isn’t enough. The Master’s Doctor plan is tricking him into creating a terrible calamity and then going round as the Doctor being a total bastard on top, to make sure the Doctor’s remembered by the survivors as both responsible for horrors and for being a shit.

Like the more subtle but still clear comparisons the script draws between Klein with the Doctor – and the Other Doctor – and of course between Klein and Klein, this is about both similarities and the choices people make. While the script’s own choices bottle a few of those similarities and contrasts, at heart it’s why UNIT: Dominion works – a thrilling, epic disaster movie that remembers to be about illuminating its central characters for all the Big Giant Heads, Godzilla moments and very loud explosions around it. And between those three fantastic actors all acting as mirrors of each other, I suppose it’s another reason why poor Raine doesn’t get a look in…

The Audio Visuals: When Nick Briggs Was the Doctor

Inspired by last year’s release of Justyce Served – A Small Start with a Big Finish from Miwk Publishing, I’ve also been listening to one of the most obscure Doctor Who series of all, the “Audio Visuals” from the 1980s. As Miwk’s fascinating guidebook details, these were entirely unlicensed Doctor Who audio plays made by fans which, over the course of four seasons, became increasingly ambitious and polished. Unsurprisingly, several of the people involved went on to become the founders of Big Finish and then onto the TV series, most notably Gary Russell and Nicholas Briggs. Today Nick’s known as a writer, director, producer, the voice of the Daleks and more, but to a select group of cassette-listeners in the 1980s he was the Doctor. I was at school when these were produced and only heard of them as tantalising rumours; in the late ’90s, a friend gave me ripped copies which I only heard a few of before upgrading my PC and finding nothing would play that species of audio file any more; but after buying Justyce Served, someone else kindly gave me another set of the Audio Visuals plays that would, well, play. So far I’m three quarters of the way through them, and should I not return to review the lot, each season so far has been a quite remarkable jump in quality from the previous one. The first is a bit ropey in production and acting and all right in terms of stories; the second finds them suddenly finding their feet and producing something much more listenable; the third suddenly sounds professional, with all the stories pretty strong and a persuasive ‘arc’ running through it (though of all the stories, the grand finale is stronger on ideas than coherence). If you come across them in the dark and forgotten lanes of the Internet, there’s a good case for starting at the third series, I’d say. And the strange thing is that of the half-dozen stories remade since with much bigger budgets and more professional casts, mostly by Big Finish, the originals are almost always the most successful…

Labels: Alex MacQueen, Audio Visuals, Big Finish, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, New Adventures, Personal, Peter Capaldi, Reviews, Sylvester McCoy, The Master, The Thick of It, Tracey Childs

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… Last time I unleashed the scene-stealing megalomania of the seven TV Masters. Who could follow that but the Doctor simply being Doctorish – not rising to universal glory, but an individual who’s endlessly fascinated, fascinating and fun. So here are some tips for whoever gets tonight’s blessing on how to do it… Accompanied by a supporting selection of other Doctorish Doctors that spring to mind (but which?), in the lead today it’s Colin Baker, summing up the Doctor in a perfect moment:

“I am interested in everything…”

It’s been too long, hasn’t it, since the last one of these? And it’ll need more than getting back each Saturday to catch up. But never mind all that – the best thing is just to get on with it. I saw Colin Baker at an event three weeks ago today and he was, as ever, a delight: friendly, interesting and very funny. Today it’s common to praise Colin’s Doctor for his Big Finish audio adventures*, and it’s true that he has a finely tuned voice and an especially erudite way with words (and an occasionally bombastic style that greatly influenced my early public speaking). But it does him a disservice to do that at the expense of his TV portrayal. What’s rarely mentioned is how fabulously watchable he is, not just being one of the sexiest Doctors, not just in big actions, but in small but intriguing moments, constantly worth keeping your eye on – even when, all right, sometimes he has to play against the scripts – in always giving the impression of being interested in everything.

That, for me, is a defining trait in the Doctor, and whenever you watch Colin’s incarnation, you can see it even before The Two Doctors author Robert Holmes (someone who understood the Doctor about as well as any writer ever has) came along to give him lines that went with his flow and then asserted that character point explicitly. And for those who find this Doctor less watchable for one particular visual reason, in this scene he’s even got out of that coat.

Paired with a popular former Doctor, Patrick Troughton, you’d expect Colin’s Doctor either to have the show stolen from him or be frenetically overcompensating throughout The Two Doctors. Instead, he gets to be more confidently the Doctor than in any of his previous stories. It’s not just because Colin’s working harder to compete – while he certainly rises to the challenge, he seems counter-intuitively far more relaxed in his portrayal than he had been until now, and it’s because Bob Holmes instinctively knows how to write for the Doctor and Colin’s happily in harmony with that.

Half-way into Part Two, the Doctor (Colin Baker) has sensed echoes of a previous self (Patrick Troughton) in trouble and leapt, electrified, to his aid. But when the TARDIS materialises rather strikingly in a Spanish grove, the Doctor emerges with his enthusiasm tightly focused. Taking in everything around him, he strikes exactly the right note with a useful witness who takes the TARDIS for a branch of Interpol – a washed-up ham actor and restaurateur, accompanied by his braver and more practical companion…

“Officer! We have to report a tragedy. Stark disaster has struck this – simple countryside.”
“Has it indeed? What manner of disaster, Mr…?”
“Botcherby. Oscar Botcherby at your service, sir, and this dark-eyed naiad is named Anita.”
“Oh, come on, Oscar. There’s been a plane crash.”
“Well, of course, it may not be your department. I – I can see from your raiment that you obviously belong to the plain clothes branch.”

And, all right, I always laugh at that bit. Oscar and Anita are another of Mr Holmes’ sly mirrors of the Doctor and companion – Oscar goes on a bit, and we bet she’s not his girlfriend – but his florid digressions about clothes, groves and moth-hunting give Colin a marvellous opportunity to make his own performance smaller while still fascinating, and as the ‘concerned copper’ prompt the lily-livered thespian’s sense of public service. In my favourite part of the exchange, you can help but know that the Doctor’s reply, though gently guiding Oscar back to the point, is the absolute truth:

“Are you interested in Lepidoptera at all?”
“I am interested in everything, Mister Botcherby – but mainly, at the moment, in this ‘crash’ you heard.”

It’s a small but perfectly formed scene in which I always share the Doctor’s evident delight at having found the trail – and at having found someone else whose life will never be the same again…


*Big Finish have just announced a permanent price cut to some of their ranges, including now offering their first fifty Doctor Who stories at just £5 for the CDs or £2.99 on download: happily if you want to experience the Colin renaissance, this includes several of his very best, from The Marian Conspiracy, an historical adventure that introduces a companion and cake, to The One Doctor, which is an absolute scream, more of his definitive sparring with Terry Molloy as Davros, and of course two brilliantly uncomfortable black comedies from later Doctor Who TV writer Rob Shearman which I would thoroughly recommend – The Holy Terror, just reviewed by Andrew Hickey, and my own personal favourite of the range, Jubilee.

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 1 – Marco Polo

Inspired by tonight – and by being the antithesis of the Master – I let several other especially Doctorish moments simply spring to mind. This one has perhaps my favourite Doctor in one of the Doctor’s first and still most arrestingly unpredictable moments. On my previously long-derelict Doctor Who story-by-story blog Next Time, I Shall Not Be So Lenient! I’ve finally been getting back into the swing over the last few weeks with a preposterously wide array of random one-liners about the early story Marco Polo. In Marco Polo Episode One, the TARDIS has broken down in the Himalayas and the time-travellers’ lives saved by Messr Marco. But, determined above all else to get home to Venice, the self-serving git shows he’s not taken them and the Ship along for altruistic reasons. He wants to bribe his master the Mighty Kublai Khan into releasing him from his service with no less a stolen ‘gift’ than “a caravan that flies”. The thief holds our heroes at swordpoint and lectures them on why his need is greater than theirs, an argument he upholds by refusing to let them answer back. The Doctor’s reaction is much that you’d expect: impatience; blazing fury; incredulity at Polo’s blithe suggestion he can build a new TARDIS in Thirteenth-Century Venice. But after Polo stalks off, refusing to be made to feel guilty merely for committing armed robbery and stranding people, the travelling companions turn to the Doctor (William Hartnell) for an answer. He hasn’t got a clue. So in one of the most endearing moments in fifty years of our hero, they all have to stand by in appalled resignation as he does the only thing he can when faced with such utter calamity: he sees the funny side and collapses into uncontrollable giggles.

“Grandfather – Grandfather!”
“Yes. Go by sea, he says!”
“Why are you laughing?”
“Ooh, hoo hoo hoo!”
“He means it!”
“Doctor, he’s serious!”
“I know he is, yes!”
“But what are you going to do?”
“Oh, ho, ho! I haven’t the faintest idea!”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 2 – The Enemy of the World

By ten minutes into Episode 1, our heroes have landed for a paddle at a deserted Australian beach, found it less deserted when they’re shot at by assassins in a hovercraft and rescued by an even more dangerous woman in a helicopter on orders from a mysterious superior who seems to been in charge of the others, too. So when they take a breather, the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) senses that however friendly she may seem, the band of gunmen may have had an ulterior motive for trying to kill him and she may have an ulterior motive for saving him. He gives very little away until he knows more, and this time he makes her laugh as he cleans her flesh wound while quietly parrying all her questions with an undercurrent of questions of his own – and it’s not long before he finds out just how ruthlessly efficient she is, nor what everyone suddenly sees in him…

“Oh, you’re a doctor?”
“Well, not of any – medical significance.”
“Doctor of law? Philosophy?”
“Which law? Whose philosophies, eh?”
“Oh, I see. You’re determined to be mysterious.”
“Am I?”
“Um… Doctor of science?”
“Septic spray. That should be right.”
“A Doctor of divinity, then!”
“You’ll run out of Doctors in a minute.”

But we still haven’t.

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 4 – The Ribos Operation

The Doctor (Tom Baker) is all set to go on holiday when interrupted by thunder. Well, that much is typical. What’s less typical is that the thunder is inside the TARDIS, and that after the lights go out, suddenly the place blazes with light, organ music bellows, and a mighty voice asks if he really needs to know who’s calling. He might use the name “Guardian”, but we know who this is, and you do have to wonder how much of an influence it was on Time Bandits for a loud, scary God to then be revealed as a quiet, much more scary character actor giving understated orders and threats. That is, if all those people taking him at his word that he is the nice one are right: he is, after all, something of a bastard, and not only does he not offer the Doctor any of the drink he’s sipping, sat on his chair in his white suit and hat, but the green liquor in carafe looks like absinthe, and you know another word for that. But whether to God or Devil, the Doctor’s response is the same – he’d prefer to make his own choices rather than be ordered about, thank you very much. The Doctor is more annoyed by having an assistant foisted on him than by being ordered on a mission: people are more important to our hero than the big things from the first… Our hero doesn’t preen at being chosen as The Hero for a mighty quest; he’s not after glory. He’s after mucking about and seeing what he fancies – interested in everything. The deceptively mild-mannered higher power knows what makes the Doctor tick, too, and in a steely aside, makes one of the most effective threats ever heard in the series:

“Look, I’m sure there must be plenty of other Time Lords who’d be delighted…”
“I have chosen you.”
“Yes, I was afraid you’d say something like that. Ah! You want me to volunteer, isn’t that it?”
“Precisely.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You mean nothing will happen to me?”
“Nothing at all. Ever.”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 7 – Remembrance of the Daleks

The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) has been cross-luring Daleks around 1960s after a terrible Time Lord totem. But he’s at his most Doctorish for me at the end of Part Three, when plans don’t really quite work after all. Thinking he’s got most people evacuated from the dangerous bit of Shoreditch and the remainder safely out of the way in a local school, he aims to let two warring sets of Daleks fight it out for him to deal with later. But even to this day there are few more visually impressive moments in Doctor Who than the Doctor’s getting it ever-so-slightly wrong as a great big honest-to-goodness spaceship comes down in the school playground, not CGI but actually there, blowing out all the windows and blowing his plans. He even has the good grace to blink and duck out of his own cliffhanger crash-zoom.

“Doctor, we’ve had a report of a radar contact.”
“On a re-entry curve from low orbit?”
“Yes.”
“That’ll be the Imperial Dalek shuttlecraft.”
“What? They’re not landing a spaceship here?”
“Here? No. They’re much too far from the main action.”
[Roar of engines]
“You’re sure?”
“Whoa!”
“Ace, get away from the window! Down!
“…I think I might have miscalculated.”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 11 – A Town Called Mercy

And for the last few minutes when we all think of him as the Doctor (Matt Smith), the marvellously Doctorish current incarnation has been a real pleasure. Not least in strolling through the American Old West, eyeing up the town called Mercy: to quiet, plucking strings, he sees an animal-skull “KEEP OUT” sign and stone-piled boundary and does exactly what the Doctor always does with a boundary. Crosses it, points out the electric street lamp about ten years too early, and as mothers hold their children back in fear at the windows, blazes with enthusiasm:

“Anachronistic electricity; ‘Keep Out’ signs; aggressive stares… Has someone been peeking at my Christmas list?”

Next Time… From The Two Doctors to the double act of double acts.


Update: We’re both absolutely delighted with the announcement of Peter Capaldi. Hurrah! And of course he’s already had a scene for the 50, in at Number 41 – just a shame I didn’t include a photo of him and look as prescient as his character’s daughter, damn damn damn… But it’s not only one of the series’ finest stories, it’s also an impressive source of future casting, isn’t it?

Labels: Big Finish, Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Peter Capaldi, Sylvester McCoy, The Two Doctors, Tom Baker, William Hartnell