The Witchfinders

The most alarmingly notable aspect of this week’s witchy affair is massively fruity guest star Alan Cumming who has decided he’s going to chew, eat and regurgitate the scenery all over this episode. It’s a barmy performance, as if he himself has been thrown forward in time from the Graham Williams era so happily does his camp japery sit alongside Graham Crowden or Iain Cuthbertson or even Tom Baker. This is the sort of arch, explosive performance I’ve waxed lyrical over before: the delicious guest act who’s decided to come along and “do a turn” for the boys. Think Roger Lloyd Pack or Joseph Furst. It’s the sort of full-blooded oozing that Kerblam! could have done with and the leery twinkle missing from the series as a whole for some time. Only Chris Noth has come close to capturing the archetypal Who guest spot this year but Cumming goes for it full throttle, hell for leather. He’s even more knowing than Michelle Gomez. What’s more, he’s clearly enjoying himself so much we can’t take our eyes off him.

Unfortunately, this incredible hyperbole sits oddly alongside a story that elsewhere requires menace and slow brooding. It is a yarn rich in atmosphere and dread, and Cumming’s James I fights against it aggressively, making the whole thing feel tonally askew. That said, this is Doctor Who, not Hammer Horror and this is certainly Hammer through a Who lens, tonal skewing be damned. The Who world is a richer place for having Alan Cumming visit. Any other episode and he’d be greeted more like Royalty. Yes, it’s a shame he crashes into the foreboding with a fey insouciance, but the show is all the better for it. Wherever it’s to be found, this type of barnstorming performance is something to cherish, even when it’s ridiculously mis-placed.

Elsewhere, the story itself is fit to burst with witchcraft cliché but this is Doctor Who doing witches and it’s going to be the witchiest witching ever. It starts with a ducking stool and ends with a mob carrying torches. The colour palette is bleak and autumnal. The familiar visuals are there for those after a traditional tale of witchery. Furthermore, the mud monsters are terrifying, from their uncanny look to the distorted voices, they are sure to put the fear of God into the little ‘uns and my step-daughter had to put her hands over her face. The cool, green fire towards the conclusion is the icing on the cake – this is yet another sumptuous production in a string of sumptuous productions. Not one story this year has looked anything other than stirringly magnificent, Kerblam! conveyor belt notwithstanding.

It might be easy to point to the predictability of the story with negativity. I heard the Houdini quip coming long before it was spoken, the Doctor was always going to be accused of witchcraft, and the remarkable Siobhan Finneran is clearly a woman with a witchy tale to tell. But those familiar story beats help elevate The Witchfinders into the position of folklore. It’s defiantly a tale we think we’ve heard before. Punishment for the evil of cutting down a tree so as not to spoil the view feels like the very essence of country myth. The refrain of earth, air, fire and water is a neat summation of what this story wants to explore. The accused are ducked in water; the aliens defeated with fire. Even the monsters come from the earth. Despite Alan Cumming’s valiant attempts to tear this script apart, there’s a togetherness here in terms of what writer Joy Wilkinson is aiming for, a togetherness in the visuals and a unity of theme.

It’s a shame the production couldn’t manage a brief underwater shoot to better sell Jodie Whittaker as a true hero. There’s a missing shot of her Doctor plunging to the aid of the innocent in the story’s opening moments. The camera drifts away as we see a stunt double practising the front crawl. And wouldn’t it have been arresting to see the Doctor struggling in her underwater chains? It has to be noted though, that yet again, Jodie Whittaker comes off better than she has before. Here and in Kerblam! last week she is beginning to come into her own. Perhaps it’s in the writing which is more direct and straightforward, less schizophrenic and with a clarity of purpose, but her scene with James I is particularly well played. She hasn’t quite got the mettle of her predecessors but wins victories quietly and with composure. Gone this week are the goofy gurns and she actually lands a few well-timed gags.

The passages on how difficult it is to be a woman in the seventeenth century, I could have lived without though. The Doctor didn’t need to whinge about her gender in Rosa or Demons of the Punjab and it feels as if she would have the creativity to assert her presence more imaginatively rather than simply accept that “women are treated badly these days.” She’s in the presence of Siobhan Finneran who is doing a mighty fine job of being a woman, thank you very much. Whilst it might be nice to acknowledge the prejudices of the time, it doesn’t feel right to have the Doctor blithely accept them. Last year, he punched a racist. This year, she shrugs her shoulders and accepts that no-one’s going to listen to her. This feels like fundamentally un-Doctory behaviour.

I must put in a mention for composer Segun Akinola here too. The last time I brought up his work, it was to criticise those bloody awful American horns in Rosa. I’d like to remedy that by saying that his work over the last five weeks has been utterly tremendous. His weird, pulsing electronica for The Tsuranga Conundrum was a series highlight for me and here, his warped strings add eerily to the discordant atmosphere, heightening the feeling that nature herself has been twisted. Akinola has – Rosa aside – been one of the best things to happen to the show this year.

A whole, bleak, infernal world is created in The Witchfinders. It’s disturbing: from the things humans would do to fellow humans, to the mud witches themselves, to the writhing, unearthly tendrils, to the threats of drowning and burning. This is rich Doctor Who, frightening and with a marked feeling of dread undercut by the mad, mad decisions of its biggest guest star. The companions might not have a great deal to do and the series is feeling more like an anthology show with four regulars than an ongoing adventure but when Doctor Who is digging deep into all these deliciously pulsing seams, what’s not to love? The Witchfinders has flaws but it’s doing so much right, it’s easy to forgive. If someone were to imagine what a potential Doctor Who story with witches would be like, this would be it. It ticks so many boxes and presses so many buttons, it’s difficult not to come away feeling like the show has found its magic again.

8/10

JH

Kerblam!

There’s a peculiar sub-genre of Doctor Who to which Kerblam! most definitely belongs: we’re talking The Macra Terrors, Paradise Towers and Gridlocks of this world. Even Big Finish have got in on the act recently with The Warehouse, The High Price of Parking and The Dispossessed. Briefly, these stories can be identified by a vivid, singular setting, seemingly innocuous and beholden to a dark secret at its centre (or usually its basement). Here, we’re presented with the amazon depot in space, policed by helpful robots and staffed by the few residents of Kandoka lucky enough to have a job. So far, so familiar. In fact, this might be the most traditional Doctor Who story we’ve been presented with by the current production regime. It’s a taut script from newcomer and “out” fanboy Pete McTighe, slick, functional and with a strong eye for character; it works like clockwork. The robots themselves are a satisfyingly creepy design, like sinister Postman Pats. They also actually kill people – a healthy dose of death works wonders for Doctor Who. The villain has understandable yet unhinged motivations and the story keeps wrong-footing the viewer at every turn. I was convinced a robot revolution was in the works right up until the last five minutes wherein the mastermind of the piece is finally revealed. Why then did Kerblam! leave me feeling so cold?

It’s not Jodie Whittaker. She gives her best performance yet here, far more restrained and in places even steely. The dialogue is not quite as schizophrenic either, the linearity of the Doctor’s speeches perhaps aiding Whittaker? Her jokes, however, are still a source of irritation. She simply doesn’t land them. It’s almost like watching a comedienne who’s not quite convinced herself that she’s actually funny. There’s a lack of commitment in the gags which is odd for an actress so utterly committed to almost every other dramatic beat. All told though, this is Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor at her best.

Visually, Kerblam! really works. The disparate locations all tesselate spectacularly to create a rich, believable world. The clever grading on the few outdoor scenes make for the feeling that even the grass is artificial. The CG roller coaster conveyor belt sequence is perhaps beyond the realms of the BBC budget but is still the most viscerally exciting sequence of the episode which tends towards mood and tension elsewhere. And whilst I might criticise the DNEG team here for the first time this series (their work elsewhere has been mesmerising), I must applaud them for that beautiful, beautiful time vortex through which the TARDIS now spins.

No, what really doesn’t work is the episode’s pacing. This has been a problem elsewhere in the series: the opening sections of The Tsuranga Conundrum and Demons of the Punjab felt a little slow and naval-gazing but here the problem doesn’t lie with the script; it’s in the direction. Scenes which should rocket along fall flat. The Doctor keeps telling us that things are moving too fast and that her brain is struggling to keep up, but actually there’s no rush in her. It’s as if director Jennifer Perrott has gone for the money shots, rather than spending time with the actors, wondering where they’ve come from and where they need to get in any given moment. 

To give an example, there’s a scene thirty minutes in when the Doctor and gang have stolen the mobile Kerblam! Version 1.0 and its power cuts out. Jodie says, “Oh, it’s out of juice. Needs a big re-charge before I can access the code.” Any other Doctor would be desperate by now, frustrated, angry even, but here the line’s just spoken slowly. There’s an appalling lack of urgency. The actors are simply not playing into the scenes. To her credit, Julie Hesmondhalgh is the only person who acts as if she might be in a bit of a hurry. (Incidentally, there’s a cutting truth to her quiet admission that she can’t possibly remember all 10,000 workers and simply hadn’t noticed any had gone missing.) Pacing is the problem with much of Kerblam! The slower, moodier scenes work terrifically well, Yaz alone in the darkness of the Triple 9s, the robots between the shelves, is classic Doctor Who but when things get urgent, there’s an apathy in the performances. Tosin Cole drones his way through his lines. One minute I like him, the next he’s flatlined again. Look at the difference between the static, monotone scene at the top of the dispatch chutes and the CG rendered action sequence that follows. If not quite convincing, at least the DNEG boys know how to create some excitement. There needs to be more fire in the bellies of this team TARDIS, more vitality. As it goes, performatively Kerblam! ends up feeling as flat as cardboard. Even Lee Mack’s lost the ability to be funny and for a man working against the clock, he doesn’t half push that trolley slowly.

It’s a shame Kerblam! lacks the energy of its script. This could have been a corker, so traditionally, tangibly Doctor Who is the writing. Perhaps what it really needs is to push those robots forward, have them go on the rampage, and tear their way through the guest cast? There is a well-plotted, truthfully character-driven story here and due kudos to Pete McTighe but perhaps, given the premise, it would have been better to tell a thriller with the sinister Postman Pats instead? The unnerving automata show such promise in those early scenes but the show isn’t about them. It’s about a worker with a grudge. It may be more truthful, more grown-up and supremely well-structured but every child knows Doctor Who is really all about the monsters.

6/10

JH

Demons of the Punjab

After last week’s space hospital high-jinks, Demons of the Punjab couldn’t be more different. One of the great successes of Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who is the vivid difference from week to week in terms of colour, landscape and tone. Pakistan looks beautiful here, the great beauty of the natural landscape even more pronounced after the white artificiality of the Tsuranga. Both stories have one thing in common, however. They are full of heart.

Once it is revealed that Grandma Umbreen’s husband-to-be Prem is due to be killed, the story really bursts into life. All of a sudden, the stakes are raised immeasurably. I can’t help but feel if Umbreen had revealed in the very first scene with Yaz that there was at least some sadness associated with the first marriage in Pakistan, then the narrative motor driving most of the story along may have been able to propel it forwards from the very start. As it stands, the first 20 minutes, like The Tsuranga Conundrum last week are a little languorous, both worlds slowly building before the threat makes itself known. 

But what a world writer Vinay Patel creates! Although events follow the course of just two days with one small family, the perils of Partition-era India are always felt, the dangers looming off-screen, broadcast over the radio-waves and in distant gunfire. The episode evokes the doom-laden atmosphere of 1960s classics The Massacre or The Aztecs. As events take their course, the forbidding darkness of man pushes itself to the fore and a downbeat, emotional climax marks the standout moment of the story, Shane Zaza putting in a powerfully understated turn as Prem.

As for the rest of the cast, there’s a real mixed bag of talent on offer here. Bradley Walsh gives real weight to several moments, his scene with Yaz a quiet victory. But both Jodie Whittaker and Amita Suman completely trample over some quite beautiful speeches. In fact, Whittaker’s inability to find nuance in her performance, or even credibility, is becoming a major sticking point for this reviewer. Her wedding speech is truly dreadful, her charisma completely absent, her comic timing somewhere yesterday. She only shines in the scene on the spaceship when she’s facing off against the gloriously unsynchronised but beautifully masked titular demons. Perhaps there’s an element of her needing to be the star of any given scene, but she’s not written that way. In fact, her Doctor is remarkably sketchy. No one has asked her real name. No one has asked where she comes from. She’s been acutely unexplored and is getting by on bad jokes and her time machine. Perhaps, like the companions, she’ll find her episode later this year. 

Despite a number of poor performances however, this is the best episode so far this year. For all its vivid imagery and gorgeous photography, it’s about a sad, pointless shooting in a field, meaning that it feels remarkably grown up for post-2005 Doctor Who, a show in which Russell T Davies embargoed humans killing humans. The illustration of tensions between brothers is at times unbearable and the death of the holy man needless and affecting. This is Doctor Who that is resolutely about something, about people, in a way it admittedly hasn’t been for some time. I didn’t know much about Partition when sitting down to watch Demons of the Punjab. Now I feel guilty for not knowing more. I teach Pakistani children in Oldham, not too far from Sheffield. This feels like precisely the sort of material they and I need to watch. In its own way, Demons of the Punjab is essential. 

8/10

JH

The Ultimate, Defining Doctor Who Story

With such a long and varied history, it’s only natural that every era of Doctor Who has its fans and detractors. I’m a sucker for late McCoy, early Capaldi and mid-Troughton; I’m not so much enamoured with late Colin, early McCoy or mid-Matt Smith. But each era is always a re-imagining of the same show. Its DNA, like the Doctor’s, never truly changes. The heart of the show remains. With the Jodie Whittaker era, fandom seems to have been split somewhat. There are those who’ve stopped watching – and yes, those people do exist alarmingly. There are those celebrating the Whittaker era as a fresh, new revival, as if the show’s had a good spring clean. But at its centre, the programme remains resolutely the same. Which begs the question, which story defines what it is that makes Doctor Who Doctor Who? Is there a story to sum up in a few hours exactly what it is we love about the adventures of our favourite Time Lord?

Look to the fan classics and it’s very difficult to find a “typical” adventure. The Talons of Weng-Chiang is a Sherlock Holmes/Fu-Manchu mash-up featuring a time-travelling and disfigured ex-con. Plus giant rat. It’s undoubtedly tremendous but I’m not sure I can think of a similar story in the full Who gamut. There’s The Crimson Horror, Ghost Light and maybe Pyramids of Mars, but the similarities there are to do purely with the period setting. It’s a bit like comparing Downton Abbey to An Inspector Calls. They’re all quite different beasts, although it has to be noted that the turn of the century marries beautifully with the atmosphere of Doctor Who in its many forms: Human Nature feels essentially Doctor Who-y arguably because of the period. 

Blink is a Doctor-less story, told out of order and The Deadly Assassin is a companionless story with an almost dialogue-free Episode 3. City of Death has one foot in Monty Python’s Flying Circus and even the very first adventure, An Unearthly Child fails to set the benchmark for what typical Doctor Who would be like. I can see why it would be easy to make a case for Genesis of the Daleks as the go-to exemplar – Tom Baker Versus The Daleks in Lots of Corridors and a Quarry - but for my money, it’s quite a dour, humourless affair, taking itself seriously in a way most Doctor Who actively tries to avoid. So which story sums up Doctor Who in a nutshell, from start to finish, illustrating every aspect of the adventuring escapades of the mad man in a box, the show’s humour and peril, its scope and its imagination, its ambition and its joy? For me, there’s only one contender:

The Daleks’ Master Plan

Just think about it for a minute. Even superficially, it sums up the show: It’s too long, there’s a Christmas Special involved and it’s got different authors across its twelve episodes. But there’s far more to it than just its length.

The Daleks are threatening throughout. It’s almost unbelievable that in their previous TV appearance, they coughed and umm-ed and ahh-ed over dithering decisions. They even looked a bit crap. Here, they have absolute control. Their plans span the breadth of the solar system and they’re shot, judging from the three episodes we have and the various clips from elsewhere in the story, as a supreme menace. In The Nightmare Begins, as Kert Gantry creeps terrified through the jungle, the Dalek arrives, shot from below in a blaze of glory, a crash-zoom on the firing gun. Their threat is credible and felt. Everyone in the story takes them seriously and the believability of Kevin Stoney’s Mavic Chen only bolsters their status.

On the subject of Stoney, he would return to play another memorable villain - Tobias Vaughan - across a mammoth eight episodes of Patrick Troughton’s story The Invasion. His performance alongside the Cybermen is a masterclass in how to “do” Doctor Who villainy and anyone familiar and besotted with his acting chops there, can feel the cosy familiarity of yet another magnificent (though similar) performance here. That goes double for Nicholas Courtney’s performance as Bret Vyon. Courtney’s influence is still felt in the series to this day. Since his death in 2011, his character The Brigadier has been granted both an on-screen death and resurrection at the hands of Steven Moffat, and the character’s daughter Kate has enjoyed recurrent encounters with the Doctor. There is a reassurance when Courtney arrives on screen in Master Plan. We know we’re in safe hands. Those first four instalments feel embedded in the lore of Doctor Who thanks to his presence. The only tragedy is that he isn’t in more episodes. 

In terms of breadth, The Daleks’ Master Plan enjoys trips though space and time, to various alien planets (jungle, urban and volcanic), to swinging sixties Liverpool, to Ancient Egypt and to Hollywood's Silent Film Studios. No other programme can mix the otherworldly with the ordinary in quite such epic proportions. The twelve episodes of Master Plan represent Doctor Who’s size not just in minutes but in the vastness of its artistic canvas. Golden Death is literally a million miles away from Devil’s Planet. 

Master Plan might have scale in terms of its locations, but its tonal shifts could also be described as seismic. The first half is Terry Nation at his page-turning best: think Survivors or Blakes 7 scripts, gritty, hard-nosed and exciting. Once Peter Butterworth’s Meddling Monk (this era’s equivalent to the Master) arrives, the story becomes admittedly sillier, the Daleks remarkably remaining credible alongside a Doctor now happy to wrap up his adversaries in bandages and leave them in sarcophagi. Its notable that the second half of the adventure is written by Dennis Spooner, whose penchant for the silly comes happily to the fore. Despite this, the second half does conclude with a grim and ghastly big finish, the death of Sara Kingdom a reminder that the Daleks really are a force to be reckoned with amidst the high-jinks and madness. 

The Daleks’ Master Plan is a truly epic tale, itself a compact microcosm of the entirety of Doctor Who. It features a Doctor at the peak of his powers, the ultimate enemy in the Daleks, a rival Time Lord in the Monk, a strong leading villain in Mavic Chen, three companions, alien worlds, Earth history, pulpy sci-fi, farcical romps, a Christmas Special and the darkest ending. There are moments of high drama – the death of Katarina is nail-biting - and knockabout laughs with Peter Butterworth. In the end though, after all the to-ing and fro-ing, from high stakes to playground tomfoolery, the series comes out triumphant because it can handle anything its writers throw at it, so robust and bulletproof is its formula. With leading men like William Hartnell and Peter Purves at its helm, the show is unassailable. If there were ever a story to prove Doctor Who’s worth, to dazzle with its scope and potential, its borderless ambition and edge-of-the-seat thrills, it’s – perhaps surprisingly – a black and white, Twelve-Part Dalek Story from the 1960s.

JH

The Tsuranga Conundrum

For fifteen minutes, my heart went out to Yaz. Poor Mandip Gill, regardless of Arachnids in the UK, has had so little to do this series. And then… and then, that scene with Ryan. It clicked: this is what the companions this year are all about. The relationships are starting to work in a vividly powerful, confident way. Their relative voyages through the Doctor’s adventures are evidently a calculated affair; this week Yaz helping Ryan come to terms with the facts of his absent father and deceased mother, last week Graham coming to terms with the loss of his wife. When choosing his favourite pieces of television three years ago, Chris Chibnall earmarked Our Friends in the North, of which I am an enormous fan. Doctor Who couldn’t be further away from Peter Flannery’s northern magnum opus but as near as dammit, Chibnall is trying to make it so. This is Doctor Who attempting desperately and for the most part succeeding to be about real people. This episode alone, despite being set in an outer space flying hospital complete with cute gremlin, features an intense brother-sister relationship, the birth of Baby Avocado and a working relationship which at the eleventh hour takes on a suddenly deeper meaning. I am also, perhaps for the first time, starting to trust that the character beats of our main cast have been carefully posited across the ten episodes, my wife now convinced that by the end of the series Ryan and Graham will finally share a fist pump. I wonder that the ten episodes of 2018 may be even richer when watched back to back as a whole, the threads in these characters’ lives slowly unfolding to form beautiful patterns across time and space.

Despite my romantic rekindling towards Chris Chibnall after this and last week’s thrilling schlock, I remain bemused by the casting of Jodie Whittaker. Here, I have no idea what she’s playing at. She holds her side as if she’s in pain for the best part of twenty minutes, even though this leads nowhere. It took me some time to realise why she’d come to this decision: she has no idea what to do with her hands. The last regular who didn’t have control of their upper limbs was Matthew Waterhouse who had an equally bewildering grasp of his lines. Whittaker cannot get a handle on the technobabble, clearly having missed a few sci-fi movies, or perhaps even Doctor Who episodes of the past. She fails to sound natural, even for an alien, and the moments of pathos and emoting feel even more overblown and tiresomely performed. I hate to say it, but she might be the single worst actor to ever inhabit the role of the Time Lord and I include the deliriously undisciplined (but completely charming) Sylvester McCoy. The early scenes between her and Astos (Brett Goldstein) are particularly painful even for hospital drama and leadenly directed, their finishing the lines at the doors before they go their separate ways feeling passé, obvious and deliberately “blocked.”

For this relatively new father, I found the story of Ryan and Jack Shalloo’s Yoss perhaps undeservedly moving. In fact, the pain with which Ryan views his relationship with his dad is becoming more and more acute. If the series isn’t moving towards a showdown and hopeful reconciliation between them, there’s no justice. Bringing to bear the very real lives of his regulars in sci-fi and extraordinary settings is one of the great successes of Chibnall’s vision of Doctor Who and I can’t wait to see how his writing team handle Pakistan next week. There are other moments of genuine pathos too: Astos’s brave last words and the - for once - restrained off-screen death of Eve Cicero.

The Pting is an unusual creature which really works: it’s cute but it’s been built up enough before we see it to represent the most hostile risk to life - absolute. Its defeat is cleverly orchestrated too, Chibnall using his base-under-siege against the monster in the same way Terrance Dicks uses his lighthouse or Russell T Davies the telescope of Torchwood House. My only worry is that, five episodes in, we’ve yet to see a truly memorable Big Scary Monster that isn’t a giant spider. But there are demons promised…

All told, despite some now characteristic but only occasional clod-hopping dialogue, this is a tight little chamber piece, Chibnall cleverly structuring his script around the teams of characters and allowing for increasing jeopardy and threat in each scenario. By the story’s conclusion, Voss and the Ciceros and Mabli and even Timelash’s Ronan felt real, memorable characters with lives beyond the story. It took a while to get there, and we had to endure those awful scenes with Astos and an injured Doctor as well as an ill-placed, massively pace-damaging lecture on anti-matter but we finish with a prayer to the universe, for thankfulness in the kindness of our fellow human beings and that’s a rather beautiful, wholesome message to send out. This story, in the end, is full of heart. Even the Pting makes it out of the Tsuranga with a full belly. 

7/10

JH

Ravenous 2

In a parallel universe, where Doctor Who was not reborn in 2005, Paul McGann is the current leading man. When Storm Warning arrived in January 2001, for many fans, myself included, it was as if the series had well and truly returned, the adventures continuing in audio form, brand new, unbound by continuity and with the ability once again to go anywhere and be anything. What’s more, they were some of the best adventures there had ever been, The Chimes of Midnight still regarded rightly as a zenith in Doctor Who storytelling. The Charlotte Pollard storyline was the audio equivalent of the Rose Tyler arc and this new Doctor was as sexy, appealing, different and modern as Christopher Eccleston would prove to be four years later. Nowadays, we know exactly how the Eighth Doctor meets his demise, thanks to Steven Moffat’s The Night of the Doctor, but I still think of the Paul McGann adventures as the ongoing series, running in parallel with the TV programme. Whenever an Eighth Doctor boxset falls through the letterbox, guiltily they feel just that little bit more exciting than any of the other incarnations’ releases. The story goes on…

Currently, we’re partway through Ravenous, a series of 16 CDs across 4 boxsets. The first set didn’t quite feel as grand and operatic as Dark Eyes or Doom Coalition but was a welcome return to the more freewheeling days of those early Charley adventures, unconnected and richly different stories. The Eighth Doctor, Liv and Helen make for a fine TARDIS contingent: fun, intelligent, vibrant and dynamic. 

Much has been made of Helen’s family background since she arrived aboard the time machine and so opener, Escape from Kaldor, instead mines Liv Chenka’s lineage for dramatic impact. We leave the story excitingly unsure of what Liv has been up to in her private time but on the whole, this is a pretty standard run-around. There are a few moments of exciting jeopardy, but no real new ground is covered. For a story seeking to warm our nostalgic cockles with Voc Robots, it’s almost criminal that they are all voiced by female actors, meaning they sound nothing like the Vocs of old. This is a world away from The Sons of Kaldor and its almost excessive respect for the soundscapes of the Hinchcliffe masterpiece and makes the robots’ re-appearance from an auditory perspective pretty superfluous.

Speaking of masterpieces, Ravenous 2 is worth buying if only for John Dorney’s utterly fabulous, terrifically clever and defiantly Christmassy Special, two-parter: Better Watch Out and Fairytale of Salzburg. If there were ever a story to rival the aforementioned Chimes of Midnight in the classic Big Finish Christmas adventure stakes, it’s this. The first part has a uniquely European Seasonal atmosphere, a first for Doctor Who and the happy team of the Doctor, Liv and Helen fit snugly into this warm world of bratwurst sausages, roast chestnuts and eggnog.

John Dorney has fun with narrators across the two episodes, the Doctor opening the story with a dark tale of yuletide horror, the Krampus arriving in a little girl’s living room one night to eat her father. Later, playful imps begin to spirit away “naughty” revellers in the streets of Salzburg before the legendary beast itself rears its head from beneath the nearby hills. This is not just Doctor Who riffing on folklore, this is Doctor Who creating a story of its own mythic proportions. The second narrator is seemingly divorced from the main narrative, but the Pilgrim is played by Siân Phillips which instantly grants her legendary status before she utters a word. The true identity of the Pilgrim is withheld until the very moment Dorney needs to show his cards and the revelation is truly shocking. It also allows for the only occasion when “wishes really do come true” to be played without feeling trite or schmaltzy. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that his two-parter really is an “instant classic” to use a Steven Moffat expression. Part Sound of Music, part Christmas Carol, part Hammer Horror, totally Doctor Who, this really is as good as it gets.

Following such magnificence, closer Seizure was always going to have difficulty making an impact but running at only 48 minutes and parading itself as a dark, horror story after such a fundamentally brilliant dark, horror story with Bonus Christmas, it has its work cut out. Seizure is such a slight tale that in contrast to Fairytale of Salzburg it feels even smaller and its villains, the eponymous Ravenous, make for second-rate baddies after the devil that was the Krampus. Seizure’s major problem seems to be that it wants to be a tight little atmospheric tale of terror, but it is resolutely not scary and hasn’t got any shape. The ending is signposted throughout in such large capital letters meaning that it feels patronising where Salzburg felt like an intricate jigsaw the reader had to piece together right up until its final scene. After such hard-hitting, ambitious story-telling, Guy Adams’s Seizure can only end up feeling like the damp squib after the bonfire. It’s still nice though to have a cliff-hanger ending to tide us over before Ravenous 3 with Only Charley Bloody Pollard making her return!

Overall, this set is all about that monolith at its centre. There’s a place for simpler, trad stories like Escape from Kaldor and it’s certainly strong meat and potatoes Doctor Who from Matt Fitton. Better Watch Out and Fairytale of Salzburg, on the other hand, push the boundaries of what Doctor Who can be and through their ambition point the way forward. This is vivid, bold story-telling and, just as those early tales of Charley and her Eighth Doctor felt modern and immediate, this too feels like the Doctor Who of tomorrow. Were the Christmas Special to have been released on its own, I’d shamelessly grant it a 10/10 review. With two lightweights either side of it, however, I’m going to have to regretfully lose a few points. I’d urge anyone who hasn’t tried an Eighth Doctor release though to give Ravenous 2 a shot though. If rumours are to be believed, Doctor Who may be without a Christmas Special this year; Big Finish have already come to the rescue. Try a day out in Salzburg with Paul McGann instead. I promise it’ll be rip-roaring.

8/10

JH