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

Arachnids in the UK

I love Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. I love the crassest of Chris Chibnall’s Torchwood episodes: I’m an absolute sucker for Cyberwoman. That probably makes me the worst person in the world to review Arachnids In the UK but… I bloody loved it.

After three episodes of a series which seems to have been desperately trying to ape Russell T Davies’s simpler template for Doctor Who without quite generating the same energy and swag, here is the first episode which feels truly like a vision from Chris Chibnall and it’s all the better for it. For the first time, the companions really do click. There is a place for each of them in the narrative. It’s easy to see why they should be working. Graham’s grieving for Grace has been a surface spattering of character up to now but here it defines him and the scenes in his house, with Grace out of focus, are the restrained highlights in an episode all about the monstrous visual spectacle. Ryan is funny in the face of adversity and along with last week’s “Thanks, Ryan. Nice one, Ryan” after his blasting away of Krasko and this week’s headbanging scene, he is fast becoming the comic relief we can relate to, the unexpected revelation of his reading his father’s letter coming at a vitally tense moment. For the first time too, we get to know Yaz and she’s quite lovely. Four weeks in, this is too little, too late, but as of now, we have a TARDIS team that have very clear motivations to travel and for the first time in a long time, the series feels freer, more open to the universe, with fewer reasons than ever to return home. The last TARDIS scene, despite some traditionally trite dialogue (“The thing with grief is it takes time.”) is the most spirited, hopeful and promising the show has been in years. That’s a lot of firsts for this series.

Special mention this week must go to Chris Noth as the loathsome Robertson. He is the very embodiment of a Doctor Who villain and along with the Stenza, Ilin and Krasko is forming a long line of Chibnall adversaries unafraid to be simply and unapologetically unpleasant. Evil bastards were notably absent from much of the Moffat era and despite my deep love of the Sherlock-writer’s years with our favourite Time Lord, it’s so lovely to have them back. Noth gives a perfectly pitched performance, snarling and ugly, terrifically funny and totally lacking in self-awareness, like the best pantomime villains. If he doesn’t hit the Number One spot of Favourite Male Guest Star in this year’s DWM poll, there must be ludicrously brilliant performances to come in the next six weeks. He is sensational.

I am terrified of spiders. They make my skin crawl and I spent much of the episode feeling a bit sick between belly laughs. Like Chibnall’s best work in the Doctor Who universe, he balances scares and laughs with aplomb. Perhaps it’s that Arachnids in the UK sets itself up as an archetypal B-Movie that his dialogue decisions really work this week. Yes, there are some very obvious, let’s say cheesy, choices, and the amount of times that someone declared that Sheffield/Yorkshire/this city had a problem with spiders was almost uncountable. But that heightened dialogue chimed with this world of Info-Dump Extraordinaire Dr Jade McIntyre and a man with a Personal Panic Room in every hotel across the world. When dealing with gigantic spiders and gigantic egos, who cares if the dialogue is similarly gigantic? And while I’m on the subject, this is the first time, despite a few flirtations, that Doctor Who has actually managed to make those gigantic spiders properly scary. They look convincing and gut-wrenching and I can’t quite believe I actually cared for one by the story’s conclusion.

Directorially, Sallie Aprahamian is the best we’ve had so far. She may not have the cinematic vistas of The Ghost Monument or Rosa to play with but she has a better sense of pace and spectacle, proving an ace at capturing a moment. The first few POV shots of scuttlings across the floor, the entire bathroom sequence and the explorations of the coal mine are stand-out achievements, and as classic, traditional Doctor Who as it’s possible to get. (Shades of The Green Death and Barry Letts’s Economist column, Hinchcliffe-era horror and RTD character drama all rolled into one.) Such scenes are the very essence of the show and it’s relieving and promising to know that Chris Chibnall seems suddenly to know exactly what he’s doing on this account.

Overall, this is the most unashamed Doctor Who episode in a long time. It’s shameless hokum, full of incident, thrills, laughs and scares. There’s nothing deep about it – although the environmental messages strangely manage to hit home in the middle of this operatic horror – but it has a very definite agenda: to entertain. This is perfect Saturday night entertainment broadcast on Sundays. Even Segun Akinola’s back on form. For the first time this season, I’m “with” Doctor Who again. And it feels bloody terrific.

8/10

JH

Rosa

Rosa represents the sort of material which makes it very, very difficult to review without wondering what sort of reaction you might get from the very vocal, paradoxically right-on left brigade. I am as liberal and lefty as they come, believing everything the Doctor believes in, but I endured a humiliating defeat when arguing with my – staggeringly intelligent – younger cousin when she spat the words, “You would say that because you’re a straight white male” at me. Onlookers may have seen me manually retrieve my jaw from the floor and force my opinions back inside my mind where they so obviously belonged. Now, I am neither a man of colour, nor a female, so I fear that whatever I have to say about Rosa may be rendered worthless by people who seem to think that straight white males are incapable of empathy with anyone other than straight white males. A straight white male wrote half this story alongside renowned author Malorie Blackman, and it’s only by the standards of his last few writerly efforts that I can judge Rosa.

To be fair, the first scene on the bus is pretty magnificent. Although the dialogue is as on-the-nose as dialogue is ever likely to be, it’s directed with furious intent. Trevor White plays the loathsome character of bus driver James Blake without fear of looking ugly and a truthful, hateful abomination of a man lives and breathes vividly on the screen. Vinette Robinson as the eponymous Rosa Parks is, by contrast, remarkably and powerfully understated, the strength of her performance in her quiet resilience and stoicism. 

Moments of brilliance abound over the next ten minutes. It’s a real thrill to see the TARDIS materialise in the alleyway of a truly all-American-looking 50s Montgomery and doesn’t the new exterior look completely delicious? There is the strongest sense of place here, wiping the floor with the likes of Daleks in Manhattan which made do with a few plate shots to simulate the USA. The scene in the street in which Ryan picks up the lady’s handkerchief and is slapped by her husband for being black is extraordinarily powerful in its illustration of the banality of such everyday racism. It’s almost impossible to believe that the mindset of the population of this town was as such a mere 63 years ago. Such contemptuous behaviour is unthinkable to the rational, modern even humane mind and it’s almost impossible to imagine why people decided to treat each other this way in the first place. The brief interchange here illustrates the issues faced by people of colour economically and with a hard-hitting, almost literal punch. The only problem with this scene is that it’s the most powerful one in the episode, saying everything this episode has to say in thirty seconds without feeling the need to explain itself.

The biggest issue with the show on the whole right now is the clunky dialogue. I worried about Chris Chibnall’s propensity for graceless, sledgehammer tactics and here, the lines could all be screamed at us and we wouldn’t notice the difference so aggressively unsubtle and expositional are so many of the passages. The worst offending scenes are Ryan and Yaz’s disclosure on racism behind the bins and that last TARDIS lecture, impotently importantly delivered by Jodie Whittaker. To see the events take place in themselves is enough to persuade any remotely empathetic human being that these acts are despicable. The running commentary is unnecessary and not a little patronising. Awkward dialogue elsewhere that isn’t making points at us feels amateurish too: signposting the means of Ryan’s defeat of Krasko in the hotel room so blatantly is toe-curlingly poor writing.

Aside from the very funny Banksy joke, there’s so little humour here that the subject matter starts to feel po-faced and over-reverential rather than important, thought-provoking and above all real. It is as if the writing team have made a list of What We Can’t Possibly Do Because It Might Offend Someone ideas and stymied their own creative flow. For instance, monsters would render the ideas on offer laughable, so we can’t have any of those. Imagine the headlines. (Worked for Vincent Van Gogh but he was only insane, not a person of colour.) We can’t have any of the characters from the future talk to Rosa about her decision because (even though that’s exactly what a person from the future might do and would make for extremely interesting conversations) it would render Rosa without agency. We have to have a person of colour aboard the TARDIS so that the team’s commentary isn’t from a white-only perspective. It feels like any other TARDIS team couldn’t have had this adventure without some corner of the internet feeling offended. It’s a sad reflection of society that every aspect of this production feels artificially constructed because it feels the need to tread as carefully around subjects as the TARDIS team do when stepping into history. The story is so busy telling us how obviously wrong racism is that it forgets to explore its roots and complexities and essentially its drama.

What’s more, we’re stuck with a villain lacking any kind of presence. He can’t possibly match Vinette Robinson’s stoic Rosa nor even Jodie Whittaker’s more affirmative Doctor. Granted, in a rather neat conceit, he can’t harm or kill anyone thanks to a nice nod back to Stormcage Prison and the intricacies of his scheming – the damaging of the bus and the mocked-up timetables – make for exciting, unusually small-scale problems to solve. However, Joshua Bowman looks like a Strictly dancer as opposed to a white, racist, criminal time-travelling supremacist. Surely casting someone as cranny, tortured and frightening looking as Ken Bones or Ian Hanmore would have made more sense than America’s next Top Model? The point might be that racism is invisible and that sexy young bucks can be racists too but Bowman isn’t remotely scary despite Segun Akinola’s valiant attempts to flag up the threat level with some discordant strings every time Bowman walks flaccidly into shot.

In fact, Akinola is suffering his first off-day. Last week’s Ghost Monument score was thrillingly industrial and other-worldly. Here, he provides a story about the evils of America with a saccharine cavalcade of We Love America horns. He’s even replaced in the last few minutes by Andra Day singing the embarrassingly over-produced Rise Up (probably from Chris Chibnall’s Spotify playlist along with that bloody awful Glorious song from the adverts), which criminally overwrites the closing theme tune, at the last minute making the powerful events of the climax seem distastefully mawkish. 

That final bus scene, however, has moments of supreme tension. (Doctor Who definitely has a history of brilliant bus scenes, even in this episode alone!) Jodie Whittaker makes her best performance choices so far here, unnerved that the bus is noticeably emptier than planned. The realisation that she and her companions must stand by and watch the most unjust prejudice unfold is gut-wrenching and were it not for the overblown musical choices, the sequence might have really hit home.

There’s no denying Rosa’s heart is in the right place. It’s exciting that Doctor Who wants to tackle the issues that matter. (The Sylvester McCoy era is my spiritual Doctor Who home and a part of that is down to its obsession with becoming socially relevant and dare I say it, trendily on-message.) But Rosa goes about its exploration of 1955 Montgomery in as blatant and unadventurous a way as possible. It’s striking that it dares to say Paki but it can’t bring itself to say the less anachronistic, more controversial Nigger. It’s walking so carefully on a tightrope that it never gets to say anything truly hard-hitting, other than the least controversial message conceivable: Racism is Still Bad. For a show as optimistic as Doctor Who, which in the past has relished the idea that racism in the future is all but defunct, Captain Jack for example refusing to notice species let alone skin colour, the bad guy here is disappointingly just another racist from the future. 

As is only proper, it is Vinette Robinson who perhaps leaves the drama with the most dignity intact. She brings heart, poise and reality to some hokey lines and says so much with facial expressions alone. In fact, she wipes the floor with the regular cast, bringing us to the show’s second biggest issue at the minute: the cast aren’t strong enough to sustain the clunky dialogue. They all of them, even the more experienced Bradley Walsh make the most obvious, “first-reading” choices and flag up the cliched, hackneyed nature of the ham-fisted lines they are dealt. Next week, we can be sure of three things: the title sequence will still look utterly gorgeous, the TARDIS set will still look utterly wretched and we’ll still be in the company of perhaps the most uncharismatic set of regulars we’ve ever had. Hopefully, Vinette Robinson has taught everyone, from writers to actors to directors, that less is so obviously more.

4/10

JH

The Delian Mode: The Radiophonic Music of Doctor Who

Before I ever had a CD player, I had two Doctor Who CDs: The Five Doctors and Earthshock, soundtrack CDs from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It seemed like an eternity before a small Sharp ghetto-blaster arrived in my bedroom and oh, what sounds greeted me!

Despite the infuriating lack of Paddy Kingsland (Hello, Logopolis soundtrack! Where are you?), the likes of Malcolm Clarke, Peter Howell and Roger Limb were plenty for a young mind to immerse themselves in. Favourites included the Janissary Band from Snakedance, that Five Doctors Gallifreyan horn, Warriors of the Deep (the music of which is easily the best aspect of the whole production) and those exotic howls of the desert Planet of Fire. Earthshock’s March of the Cybermen was also an oft-repeated track in that little attic bedroom. My early Doctor Who experience is steeped in the aura of these two CDs. When I think of the time spent reading the books, magazines and comics of my youth, they’re entrenched in electronica. I even came to like Exploring the Lab from Four to Doomsday. 

My Dad was a private gardener when I was young and would often come home with nick-nacks gifted to him by his usually well-off clients. One day, he brought home a tape recorder. No mic was needed to record one’s voice, just some empty C90s and the ability to press two buttons at once. It was probably more of an early Dictaphone. But the recorder, along with the music and the issues of Classic Comics I’d been collecting meant for one thing: my brothers and I could record our own Doctor Who Audio Adventures! When I think back, this being well before the days of Big Finish and with only The Pescatons, The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space to epitomise the auditory landscape, we must have been veritable pioneers.

I was always the Doctor because I was the eldest and most selfish. James, second eldest but with a ridiculously high voice, played the main villains: his Extortioner was to die for.  The youngest brothers, the twins, played the minor parts but usually one of them quit halfway through production after repeated failed attempts at the same couple of lines. Favourite scripts included Death Flower, The Urgrakks and the Troughton epic with the big spiders: “Die hideous creature, die!” Always, we used those two CDs as soundtracks to our adventures. Meglos, with its rattling screech, we had a particular fondness towards so it was nice to see a similar approach to music adopted by Steven Moffat and Richard Curtis’s team on The Curse of Fatal Death.

Sound effects was the major area in which we were decidedly inefficient although the feminists would have had a problem with our all-male casts despite there being only one female in the house (and Mum was not remotely interested). We tried desperately in the recording of Death Flower to make the sound of a twig snapping. We broke pencils in half over and over again, but the mic simply didn’t pick them up. In the end, we resorted to one of us actually saying, “Snap!” We joke squirmingly about this over dinner parties to this day.

My personal favourite production was a script I’d written myself: The Game Show of Death in which the Doctor, Jo Grant and the Brigadier were invited onto a panel show whose losers were killed. The cliff-hanger to my young ears sounded amazing. One of us screamed, “No Brigadier!” then we used the sound of Viner getting shot in The Tomb of the Cybermen and the music cut in, Spearhead from Space-style, without sting, all of a sudden. It was a ludicrously satisfying moment of childhood creativity. I do still love those Spearhead cliff-hangers just as much as I love a sting. And remain irrationally irritated when the sting criminally fades in. It’s nice to have a couple of shots over the top. The Robots of Death Part Two or even The Woman Who Fell to Earth are classic examples of how to do the sting well.

Being fascinated by the electronic music of Doctor Who - as close as humankind is likely to get to the music of the spheres - I am currently thrilling at composer Segun Akinola’s move towards incidental atmospherics as opposed to recognisable tunes. Look at his Ghost Monument score: the first seven minutes of the episode take a good while to form into solidly recognisable music, industrial clanging and an electronic bassline building and building to generate tension almost unnoticeably. By the time the spaceship is crashing, those alien drums are pounding. I so hope this is indicative of the rest of this season. Weird, synthetic musical confusion has been missing from the show since its return, apart from a few moments in Forest of the Dead and Heaven Sent, which remain orchestral for the most part. I must give a passing mention to Into the Dalek too here: that was a strikingly different score with plenty of 1980s electronic overtones. 

Someone noted recently that electronic scores are what a programme is granted before it has the money to find an orchestra. Doctor Who did things the other way round. Twice. JNT’s introduction of the Radiophonic Workshop mirrors Chris Chibnall’s appointment of Segun Akinola at the musical helm of our favourite show. I hope one day, somewhere in another little attic bedroom, some other children are finding their own ways to adapt the music of Doctor Who: to create new worlds and times, to act and imagine and live inside the rapture of the show, to make the show their own through the electronic majesty of its wondrous music. 

JH

The Ghost Monument

This week’s instalment of the brand-new, spruced up version of that show we used to know as Doctor Who starts with ten minutes of the most visually arresting material the series has ever put on screen. The new title sequence itself is beautiful, new and old at the same time, with a great underwater backwards dive a few seconds in before the ubiquitous musical howl kicks us into space. Its only problem as far as I can see is its brevity. Then we’re plunged headlong into a world of starships and planets.

Quite wonderfully, we witness the arrival of our heroes in the spaceships from the perspectives of our characters. We see more of the inside than the out of these craft – which look magnificent in all their CG glory – and the colour palette within is rich and deep and otherworldly.  Then we’re on an alien planet which feels genuine in a way that matte shots and CG vistas simply cannot emulate. Here we have a desert, a sea, a mountain range and an empty city, each location as convincing and bold as the one before, all real places. The money shot though is that furiously crashing spaceship. Graham, Ryan and Angstrom run desperately through the sand as the ship plummets through the sky towards them. Never has a spaceship felt so very present in a Doctor Who story and this is just the sort of visual flamboyance the show has perhaps missed over the last three years. It feels like a long time since Big Ben being destroyed or a hospital on the moon or even a giant dinosaur in London, but the opening of The Ghost Monument, together with last week’s crane stunts, suggests Chris Chibnall has an eye for a punctuating visual. 

The plot itself is intriguing but slight: a race to the other side of Desolation. For the most part the action is pacey though the stretch across the ocean threatens to knock the wind of its sails, for wont of a better term. Chibnall uses these quieter moments to look at his characters but the writing is a little on the nose and lacks grace. I found myself finishing Epzo’s predictable story for him and the scenes between Graham and Ryan are a little unpolished and lack truth. Chibnall writes with a lot of heart but he hasn’t got a great ear for dialogue. Still, better to have heart than pure purple prose. 

We also get to see our new Doctor in action, perhaps more stabilised than last week. To be frank, I still have major misgivings about Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Who. Her breathy, forced delivery feels patronising, as if she needs to explain her performance choices to us as she makes them. The technobabble doesn’t sound at all natural and she plays the cliched reading of her more dramatic lines every single time. I’m sincerely hoping I’ll either get used to her or she’ll get better. She simply needs to relax; treat the lines as if she says this kind of every day. At the minute, she is ploughing every ounce of energy into even the most mundane line and becoming grating. This is a woman who I thought was outstanding in Broadchurch so I’m struggling to see what’s gone so wrong. Perhaps Ms Whittaker is just very limited.

Tragically, after all the imaginative panoramas, beautiful landscapes and design innovation, the new TARDIS set is awful, isn’t it? For a kick-off, it’s far too small: the ceiling is too low and the room feels claustrophobic. It’s the only room in the show so far to have felt like a set. The over-sized, orange, crystalline plinths mean there’s no space for a four shot by the console. It almost looks as if it’s been shot against black drapes, so dark and seemingly non-existent are the walls. And the custard cream maker is neither funny nor kooky. When everything else this series is so wondrous to look at, it’s a shame the TARDIS doesn’t seem to stand for anything: it isn’t homely, atmospheric, sterile, magical or sensory. It’s just black and orange.

I must make mention of Susan Lynch and Shaun Dooley who bring a re-assuring and welcome earthiness to an entirely outlandish adventure, their regional accents routing the drama in reality. I’m still not convinced by our main cast, although Bradley Walsh stole all the glory this week after an unsure start in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. All in all though, for a story taking in so many alien environments, this was an easy-to-follow, linear adventure, full of exciting set-pieces and stunning visuals. It wasn’t a story that was actually about very much though and the set-pieces sometimes felt like the skeleton of a story that wasn’t really there. Hopefully, next week, we’ll have something just as beautiful but a little meatier to digest.

6/10

JH