Doctor Who And The Silence In The Library (Incorporating Doctor Who And The Forest Of The Dead)

This look at series four two-parter Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead originally appeared in a fanzine, albeit in an unapproved truncated form because the designer wanted to fit in some flashy headings; unfortunately, this resulted in some parts of it not actually making sense. You can insert your own jokes about the full version not making any sense either here. Many of the more pertinent points raised in this review, and some which rambled way off topic and have subsequently been trimmed, ended up reworked into a mammoth overview of the entire Eccleston/Tennant era which you can find in my 'anthology' book, Well At Least It's Free. Many of the less pertinent points are, well, less pertinent, but even so, what's interesting in looking back at this is how so many of what were originally in all honesty little more than grumbles about not really having enjoyed the episodes being reviewed have since become major talking points about the show's more recent direction; in fact there may well be something on that very subject appearing on here soon. Also, see if you can spot the bit that I wouldn't even dare to include if I was writing it now...

In those technological dark ages before the internet revolution came along, libraries were always a special place for fans of Doctor Who. Where else could you find a full set, albeit one annoyingly spread out according to the author’s surname, of the tie-in novelisations, in their hardback ‘WH Allen’ editions to boot? Venture only slightly further afield, and you might well come across such oft-forgotten gems as A Day In The Life Of A Television Producer, a photo-heavy book with disorientatingly large print in which John Nathan Turner explained how he prevented the Foamasi from being too frightening (by, one can only assume, making them rubbish).

And once you were finally allowed in the adult section, oh what esoteric joys awaited you. The dense and impenetrable Doctor Who – The Unfolding Text! That book about the Radiophonic Workshop where Roger Limb talked about having sex with synthesisers or something! Tons of American ‘Movie & TV Guides’ informing you that ‘Dr Who, the famous British sci-fi show on BBC, was created by Terry Nation’! And, if you were one of that small percentage of fans who later had reason to visit a ‘larger’ library in search of back issues of the Radio Times, many joyful hours of exasperatedly frowning at the demented Blake’s 7 fan who had gone to such great lengths to remove a small and fuzzy publicity photo of Paul Darrow.

When reading about Doctor Who, especially in one of those new-fangled ‘libraries’, you get to familiarise yourself with a lot of words. There’s ‘crochety’, for a start. And ‘emblazoned’. Yet even those pioneering fan writers, who knew an interesting word that they could repeat and repeat and repeat until their typewriter started crying out for mercy when they saw one, could never quite muster up more than a handful of superlatives between them. And that’s the problem with trying to review Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead – how can you really do it justice when you’ve already used every single superlative in existence twice over when discussing Steven Moffat’s previous Doctor Who contributions, even though they weren’t what you were supposed to be reviewing in the first place?

But hang on, don’t go scrambling for your copy of The Third Doctor Who Quiz Book just yet; it’s not that there wouldn’t be gratitude for your superlative-scouting efforts, just that there might not actually be any need for them. You see, these two episodes might well be great, but do they really match up to the established might of The Girl In The Fireplace, Blink or indeed The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, in either its combined or individual incarnations?

In strict adherence to the Dewey Decimal System (probably), let’s start with Silence In The Library and work our way across the shelves from there. Even by New Doctor Who standards, this episode was awash with anticipation and high expectation. The deservedly lofty reputation of Steven Moffat’s previous contributions to the series is a troublesome enough thing to have to live up to, but this episode also had to contend with another of those excitement-multiplying ‘mid season break’ thingymajigs replete with the standard issue attendant fan speculation (which we’ll come back to in a minute), and a really rather splendid teaser countdown on the BBC’s own Doctor Who website wherein an astutely-judged collection of fan-pleasing tomes (including the works of Douglas Adams, Monty Python and, erm, Terrance Dicks) jostled for shelf space with well-worn prop books from the original series, and a battered handwritten diary that, brilliantly, flicked past a pencil sketch of Rose Tyler at midnight every day. So, not much riding on it then.

Following all of that build-up, some of it intentional and some purely inadvertent, Silence In The Library almost delivers. Almost, but not quite. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it in itself. In fact, there’s an extraordinary amount right with it. The tension takes a long time to start building up, but when it finally does it proves well worth the wait; the idea that the whole sense of danger is based on nothing more clever or sophisticated than making sure you don’t stand in the wrong place, like an episode of The Adventure Game gone nightmarishly wrong, works fantastically and is nastier than any amount of spaceships straying too close to dangerous things could ever hope to be. Meanwhile, the flashing between the library and the mysterious little girl who claims to be able to see it all in her head really does keep the viewer guessing, and hands up who else mistakenly thought that they’d spotted the forthcoming end-of-series story arc and that The Doctor and Donna had accidentally slipped into some sort of non-reality while the ‘real’ universe carried on oblivious?

The same goes for Forest Of The Dead, pretty much. Although the tension seems to flag very quickly indeed, the journey through Donna’s apparent dream world is nicely surreal and unsettling, and the twist when it comes is startling but makes perfect sense, unlike so many other attempts at ‘big reveals’ in New Doctor Who and Torchwood (well, mainly Torchwood). Despite the obvious disadvantage of using a big gleaming clinical modern library rather than a creepy old wood-panelled look, both episodes are visually impressive and strongly directed, and there’s also plenty of well-judged dialogue and character interaction, although Steve Pemberton seemed curiously underused – particularly annoying given the strength of the Douglas Adams allusions, as he was pretty much the only even halfway good thing about the movie version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. And then there’s the ‘corrupted’ face, the poignant final non-encounter between Donna and Lee, the way that the Vashta Nerada even sounded frightening... and, erm, Alex Kingston.

So, where to start with Professor River Song? The idea of The Doctor meeting a character from his future, who knows all about him in all sorts of intimate ways that he doesn’t even know of himself yet, is a brilliant one with bags of potential. However, something about it just failed to work, and in the end she seemed nothing more than Just Another Character, failing to elicit much sympathy from the audience (who probably cared more about Lee to be honest), nor indeed much interest in her sonic-screwdriver-owning-Tardis-diary-waving-future-event-referencing antics. It’s hard to pinpoint where this went wrong exactly, as there was nothing amiss about the character’s scripting or portrayal, but she just somehow failed to make quite the same sort of impact as her close conceptual counterpart Jenny (although in fairness Jenny stood out in a largely shabby episode that seemed to have stolen its plot from the old Viz strip The Adventures Of The Human League In Outer Space, whereas River was jostling for space on a largely fantastic one). Because of this, her knowledge of The Doctor’s name seemed insufferably smug rather than a moment of audience shock, though on the other hand her obsession with ‘spoilers’ was one of the highlights of the story. In these days of rampant spoilermania it’s hard to know which side of the fence you’re on, with the glory-hunting fans determined to be the first to know even the most inconsequential detail (and in a moment of impressive postmodernity, Steven Moffat felt compelled to wade into a speculative online discussion of Silence In The Library, still some months away from broadcast, to remonstrate with one particular repeat offender) seeming every bit as ridiculous as the media lunatics who implode their own heads with effort to keep details of even the most pathetically inconsequential sitcom ‘under wraps’, so it’s nice to see the whole concept being broadly mocked in such a disdainful fashion. Take that, feeling like you have to have an opinion on things!

‘Hang on’, you’re probably not unreasonably asking yourself, ‘if these two episodes are so good then what was all that ‘almost, but not quite’ business about’? Some minor yet still severely niggling problems with them is what it’s all about, and not just that pretty dodgy attempt at making a joke out of stammering. As impressive as both episodes were, there was a sense that regular viewers had pretty much seen them done before, only better, and usually by Steven Moffat to boot. Plot twists aside, nothing about them seemed particularly unexpected or ‘new’, and the overall effect was a bit like when a band (naming no Portisheads or Blurs) follows up a highly successful and acclaimed album with one that, while intrinsically good, pretty much does the same thing only to noticeably less impressive effect. In addition, the two episodes seemed to sit very awkwardly next to each other, with the sharp detour from the nailbiting end of the first into the surreal ambience of the second not quite working as well for the viewer as might have been hoped. Still, no matter how much they may or may not impact on enjoyment, these are really cosmetic issues - you could even argue that the variation in pace and style might be a result of their being designed for rewatching, something that was never really a consideration in the cliffhanging days of old - and they’re still pretty impressive in their own right, not to mention streets ahead of that Cybermen two-parter.

You probably don’t get too many Doctor Who fans lurking in libraries any more – after all, it’s much easier to just hop online and get the latest up-to-the-minute news on why ‘harrysaxon88’ thought Fires Of Pompeii was an eight out of ten but now thinks it might have been only a seven – but now they’ve got another, entirely different reason to feel affection towards those most dusty, wooden and book-festooned of places. And no, it isn’t 'because they all look like the Secondary Console Room'.

You can find my huge piece on the entire Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who in my book Well At Least It's Free, available as a paperback here or as an eBook here.

Doctor Who And The Idiot's Lantern

This look at the Doctor Who episode The Idiot's Lantern - originally titled Coronation Treat (yes, I know) - was dogged by controversy, which was a little strange as I'd thought of it as one of the most innocuous and even inconsequential pieces I'd ever written. First of all the fanzine editor who had commissioned it refused to print it in full, fearing that the jokes about Mark Gatiss having lost bits of archive television stashed under his bed were verging on libellous(!?), and then after publication it provoked all manner of scoffing and scorn from readers who were beside themselves that I'd dared to say that I actually quite liked it. Apparently there was some law passed about it being the one to forget about that year, without anyone telling me. I would later elaborate on this, at some considerable length, in an epic overview of the entire Russell T. Davies era which you can find in my book Well At Least It's Free. Anyway, I no longer necessarily agree with all of the points made in the review, but here it is regardless...

If anyone knows their ancient black and white television sci-fi shows, it's Mark Gatiss. After all, if the rumours are to be believed, he has all of the missing episodes of The Quatermass Experiment hidden under his bed.

Whether or not a popular comedian, writer and cult television obsessive is in fact likely to own elusive telerecordings of live television programmes that were never even recorded in the first place due to a combination of strikes, technical problems and magnified insects finding their way into the film recorder is a question best pondered on another occasion. More pertinent is the fact that The Idiot's Lantern, Gatiss' most recent contribution to the revived Doctor Who, is a clear homage to this particular and oft-overlooked strain of sci-fi. While his work with The League Of Gentlemen is awash with references to classic British horror films, Gatiss himself also has a pronounced fondness for the Quatermass serials, A For Andromeda, Night Of The Big Heat, The Trollenberg Terror and any other monochrome gem containing an overabundance of research stations, indecipherable signals from outer space, and men in long coats from 'The Ministry'.

Gatiss' enthusiasm for Professor Quatermass and his flickeringly-telerecorded chums is easy to understand; even despite the mannerisms and technical limitations of the age, these are all terrific shows that display remarkable imagination and superb direction, often relying on little more than lighting and shadows to create a sense of terror. But does their influence have any place in a programme that has purposefully reinvented itself and abandoned all of the perceived limitations and shortcomings of 'classic' BBC science fiction? Recent BBC4 remakes of The Quatermass Experiment and - slightly less successfully - A For Andromeda have stayed true to the original storylines but have given them a thoroughly modern interpretation. And that's straightforward 'modern', as opposed to the trying-to-appeal-to-all-ages dialogue and excessive application of cutting edge technology to be found in present day Doctor Who.

Countless articles in ancient issues of Doctor Who Magazine may have repeatedly proclaimed it as the 'great grandfather' of the adventures of the TARDIS crew, but in a less abstract sense present day Doctor Who is about as far removed from the original version of The Quatermass Experiment as it's possible for small-screen science fiction to get. For a start there have been countless technological advances in the intervening years, and the Doctor and Rose weren't exactly likely to be going out live and in black and white, let alone struggling with ten-minute plus single takes on one small set (or indeed battling with a giant radioactive fly landing on the broadcast equipment). The new series also relies just as much on visual spectacle as it does on atmosphere and ambience, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but isn't really suited to the style of storytelling being pastiched here. On top of that, with the best will in the world, the average script for new Doctor Who is hardly on a par with the work of Fred Hoyle or Nigel Kneale.

If anyone can pull this ambitious conceit off, though, it's Mark Gatiss. Not only does he have a genuine affection for the source material, with the previous series' The Unquiet Dead he proved himself the most adept writer so far at reconnecting this all-singing all-dancing all-too-much-CGI concept with the dramatic values and stylistic devices that had characterised the best moments of the show's past. While The Unquiet Dead was where the first series really found its feet after a couple of patchy opening episodes, this run has already seen an undisputed fully certified moment of greatness - The Girl In The Fireplace - so there was less pressure for The Idiot's Lantern to do something truly spectacular.

What The Idiot's Lantern did achieve, though, was something far more remarkable. Whether by accident or design, the writer, the production team and the performers all managed to finally perfect that 'retro sci-fi' template that former producer John Nathan-Turner was striving towards in so many of his later stories. Although JNT, bless him, was forever hampered by budgetary and technological restrictions, interference from BBC 'Top Brass', brainless scheduling, dodgy casting decisions and his own inability to see that contrived 'celebrity' cameos by people who weren't even that well known were never a good idea, he always desperately wanted to produce something that could simultaneously appeal to both lovers of cerebral science fiction and family audiences while still staying on the right side of programme planners with their brow furrowed over John Birt's latest nonsensical bureaucratic edict. There's no denying that he was adept at all of these, including on very rare occasions the last one, but what he could never really manage to do was to make them work together. If he'd been given an 'adult' sci-fi slot to play with the results would at the very least have been less akin to watching the world's slowest-drying paint than Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts' Moonbase 3, and only a couple of years later he'd have been right at home in the fifties-tinged world of massive viewing figures for Heartbeat and The Darling Buds Of May, but his attempts to bridge the two with Doctor Who never quite hit the mark.

That's not to say that the results weren't often good, as best evidenced by Remembrance Of The Daleks, Black Orchid and Delta And The Bannermen in particular, but as great as such stories may have been, they were really just an indication of what could have been achieved with more available time and resources. New Doctor Who, of course, has both of these to spare, and as such there was never any question of being unable to match a well-realised script with suitably well-realised visuals - witness how closely the opening scenes resembled those of Remembrance Of The Daleks only with a touch more visual panache. The storyline itself was hardly the most original of plot devices, calling to mind reference points as diverse as the Ace Of Wands story The Beautiful People (itself more than a little indebted to Doctor Who's own Terror Of The Autons), that episode of Angel where he gets turned into a puppet, and most jarringly - if probably unintentionally - Life On Mars. However the script was so well-realised that this didn't really matter at all.

Having already succeeded in translating the Hinchcliffe-era Gothic horror-comedy overtones into the modern format with The Unquiet Dead, Mark Gatiss has now done what many indignant JNT-bashers would have doubtless have deemed impossible, and belatedly made good on the overlooked promise of the ailing last couple of years of original Doctor Who. Here's hoping that he fancies having a go at a First Doctor-style pure historical yarn next time round. Upon which we can all start speculating about those copies of Marco Polo he has stashed away somewhere.

You can find my huge piece on the entire Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who in my book Well At Least It's Free, available as a paperback here or as an eBook here.

Doctor Who And The Long Game

If you're looking for my opinions on 'New' Doctor Who, they start right here!

At the last minute, I took the decision to drop a series of reviews of 'New' Doctor Who from Not On Your Telly, an anthology of some of my writing about the more neglected corners of archive television, due to them not really fitting the Neglected Archive TV 'theme' of the book, and also because they didn't really read well in strict chronological sequence and indeed tended to cover the same points in places. Again and again and again. Also, most of them are already online in various places (albeit usually not as they were originally written, but we'll come back to that in later instalments) - not to mention later heavily reworked into a gigantic overview of the entire Russell T. Davies era which you can now find in my book Well At Least It's Free - and so now they'll be showing up here again in brand spanking new 'Director's Cut' form. Well, sort of. Anyway, the very first 'new' episode I reviewed - although not actually the first review I wrote - was of infamous Series 1 clunker The Long Game.

In a lot of ways this was the most difficult one to write and indeed isn't really very good as a review; I still hadn't really made my mind up over how I felt about the new series as a whole, as at that point it still seemed like a wild contrast of highs and lows, and in addition I'd somehow managed to draw not so much the short straw as the straw that actually defied the laws of physics and folded dimensionally back in on itself as I ended up with the one episode in the whole of the first run that was so bland that there was virtually nothing to say about it at all (in fact, someone else had earlier asked me to review an episode purely because of my dissenting-ish voice, which they had felt would make a nice contrast to the rampant Who-mania if I was to tear into a substandard episode, but unfortunately for everyone concerned it turned out to be The Empty Child so we might just forget about that one). Even now, The Long Game is the one that people forget about altogether when they're trying to remember all of the episodes in order. Anyway, I can't pretend that this - originally titled Christopher Eccleston's Big Night in a joke about three people will get - is one of my more incisive or interesting reviews, and I ended up disagreeing with about sixty percent of it within a couple weeks anyway, but in the name of completeness here it is anyway.

The key to properly appreciating Doctor Who is to be able to laugh at it at the same time as enjoying it. To regard it with a healthy sense of absurdity, sarcasm and ridiculousness while also being able to understand what makes it great. Of course this isn't unique to this particular hobby and interest, but when you're dealing with something that attracts more than its fair share (or indeed, more than anyone's fair share) of humourless bores, it becomes more important than ever. Without that ability to find amusement in frantically padding Cybermen, you might as well just give up and join the massed ranks of tedious lunatics who spend their time writing angry letters about the likelihood of a BBC programme being introduced by the letters 'B', 'B' and 'C' and thereby ruining their enjoyment completely, or who fret over 'contentious' story titles like 'Dr Who And Tanni', 'Beyond The Sun', 'Enemy Within' and 'Ant Jones On Saturday Superstore' rather than simply chortling at them.

This was, and still is, the level on which most hardened devotees (as opposed to casual viewers) enjoy Doctor Who. Times have changed, though, since the original series bowed out with Sylvester McCoy walking into a tree and saying "the tea's going cold, aye, unless it's not", and the television industry is no longer the same place that would happily allow nonsensical cliffhangers about clambering over ice ledges with the aid of an umbrella for no readily obvious reason to go out on air unchecked. Everything about the new series is streamlined, stage-managed and slickly presented, from casting all the way down to merchandising. There are no jarringly incongruous lines of dialogue, no baffling editing decisions, no ludicrous character names, no endearingly tuneless pieces of incidental music, and no ridiculously miscast extras. There isn't even any Tardis bubble bath that promises to help "transport yourself to another dimension". It's all gloss and thematic seamlessness, and every bit of 'amusement' has been scientifically created to fit the bill. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is difficult to say; certainly there is a much higher overall standard of production, but at the expense of the endearing, honest and uncynical qualities.

That said, maybe this is all just a bit Shock Of The New, and maybe over time we'll all get used to it and see that, lack of stylistic cohesion with The Horns Of Nimon aside, it's actually a very well made show and the mere fact that it's on TV on Saturday nights is an almighty achievement in itself. That said, anyone who is bearing that in mind would do well to avoid aligning themselves with the excitement-crazed cheerleaders who have come to the fore over the last couple of weeks, who see it as their duty to sing the praises of the new series to the skies. It's not good enough to simply say that they liked an episode of the new series; it has to be lauded with ludicrously disproportionate praise that credits it with single-handedly reviving the aliling genre of small-screen drama, heralds it as the most important piece of television made since Stainless Steel And The Star Spies, and most infuriatingly of all declares it to be infinitely superior to anything that was produced under the banner of Doctor Who between 1979 and 1989 (as some predicted a while back, Paul McGann has seemingly been airbrushed from history). Although sadly the opinions of 1986 Doctor Who Magazine competition winner Randeep Kooner have gone unrecorded on this occasion; presumably he liked the music.

Anyway, in considering an instalment of the new series, it's important to try and remove it as far as possible from any preconceptions based on likes or dislikes of the old series, and within reason consider it on its own merits, but at the same time not shy away from subjecting it to the same level of critical dissection that has always been applied to the show by lovers and haters alike. To balance the the incisive and prejudice-loaded perspective of a fan with the face-value appreciation shown by the average viewer. Basically, in a sense, the review needs to be over there, and over here at the same time. And as Leela would rightly point out, that's silly.

The Long Game is the seventh episode of the first series (can we call time on this 'season' nonsense for good, please) of the revived Doctor Who. It was written by Russell T. Davies, and guest stars Simon Pegg as 'The Editor'; if the pre-transmission excitement was anything to go by, his casting was the main selling point. This is quite understandable, as Pegg is not only a bankable television star in the eyes of the general public, but also likely to lend some much-needed credibility in the eyes of those pesky fans, owing to his own grounding in sci-fi fandom and constant namedropping of various culty artefacts, though this is somewhat balanced out by his habit of throwing in comical shocked-face 'reaction' expressions which would have looked stagey and over-the-top in an episode of Galloping Galaxies!. That said, though hardly exactly giving the performance of his career as a futuristic managerial type dressed as an emaciated Derren Brown, his performance was, on this occasion, laudably restrained; no 'shocked' face reactions, no That Voice, and no attempt to lightly garnish his character and performance with a subtle veneer of hipness.

That's where The Long Game got it absolutely right. Unfortunately, none of the rest of it got anything right, or indeed anything wrong. It was just there. A weak and interest-deficient script where nothing happens until the last seven or so minutes, the two leads looking like they're in need of a William Hartnell-style mid-series holiday, events progressing without any proper explanation and leaving the viewer playing catchup, intrusive dialogue-swamping incidental music, a 'button that does this' solution frustratingly popping up yet again, and a plot revolving around the deeply irritating Adam, a 'companion' in a world where Katarina and Sara Kingdom were in it for the long haul. There's no getting away from the fact that it's a massive comedown after what's been seen so far, but they've attempted to cover for this by slathering it in so much 'production' that nobody notices.Well, you won't fool anyone who remembers that ice ledge cliffhanger.

By the way, if anyone has a copy of Stainless Steel And The Star Spies...

You can find my huge piece on the entire Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who in my book Well At Least It's Free, available as a paperback here or as an eBook here. Stainless Steel And The Star Spies is now available on DVD. It's indescribably odd.