The Greatest Hits Of Outer Space!

If you were a science fiction fan in the days before box sets, 'webisodes' and kickstarter-funded revivals, you had to make your own entertainment in the long, long months between series of TV shows or instalments of film franchises. This usually involved throwing yourself in sheer frustration into impenetrable library-sourced novels by Americans with superfluous middle initials, radio serials with 'computers' that spoke in that tinny know-all female voice, interminable board games about trading intergalactic fuel stocks or something, and numerous other fondly-recalled bits of marginal interest rainy day 'space' substitutes that you can read more about in my book Well At Least It's Free. And of course, you would get to enjoy all of these things that you didn't really enjoy that much uninterrupted, whereas the second that The Tripods started again you'd be called to the phone to speak to a well-meaning relative who'd rung to 'make sure' you know 'that it's on', and have to miss half the episode politely responding to being asked if you were watching it.

One less widely acknowledged side-effect of all of this was that you were widely assumed, often incorrectly, to have no corresponding interest in popular beat music, and that as a consequence you would like it when there was a pop song about 'space'. And not even the actual themes from your favourite films or TV shows. No, the the ones that had embarrassing lyrics about 'galactic robot battles' or something and were performed on TV by dancer-heavy ensembles apparently dressed as extras from Come Back Mrs Noah. Here, then, are fifteen of the best chart toppers from out of this world...!


Sheila & B. Devotion - Spacer


Erstwhile cutesy teenpop Gallic chart star hooks up with Chic and reinvents herself by going absolutely induced magnetosphere with the Bacofoil-clad interplanetary stylings and a song about a gadabout lover so insatiable in his appetites that he whizzes off across the cosmos in pursuit of alien 'skirt' - the possibility that this is actually about Captain Jack Harkness should not be discounted - and rendered in the sort of bing-bong-heavy existential disco sound that ensures it still enjoys bafflingly enthusiastic Jackson Sisters-levels of popularity with hen parties to this day.


Dee D. Jackson - Automatic Lover


Swoosh-heralded I Feel Love-meets-Rock Follies robo-voiced Battlestar Galactica-bandwagon gambit which sounds as though it may actually be about the female protagonist finding ways of 'enjoying' herself during epic intergalactic voyages, but was nonetheless performed on TV with the assistance of the most unreasonable sub-CP & Qwikstitch attempt at a robot ever. And bear in mind this was at a time when it looked ridiculous next to Twiki.


Space - Magic Fly


France-originated enigmatic instrumental-only 'mystery band' in stylish post-Doctor Who And The Ambassadors Of Death colour-coded spacesuits equipped with shoebox-sized synths to denote 'future', whose stark dispersonalised ode to a winged insect doing all tricks like that Derren Brown would enjoy years of ubiquity as 'and that's Thursday... on BBC1'-type backing music, to the extent that the original solarisation-ahoy performances on Top Of The Pops et al became little more than a troubling Rondo Veneziano-like half-memory. Later had their name stolen by some bloke putting new lyrics to Well Jemima, Let's Go Shopping.


Mankind - Dr. Who


Incalculably uncalled-for boogied-up mangling of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's finest hour by ad-hoc collective of unenthusiastic-looking session men, replete with nasty monophonic synth melody line, decidedly non-'canon' xylophone voluntary, and what is presumably meant to be a vocodered mock-Dalek offering such urgently-required clarifications as 'he journeys in The Tardis - through time and space!'. A novelty hit at the time but, in retrospect, probably the moment at which it all started to go wrong. And ironically, it would take another, later dance version of the theme to provide the moment at which it all started to go right again...


Sarah Brightman & Hot Gossip - I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper


The Everett-endorsed lingerie-almost-wearing 'racy' dance troupe led by Arlene Phillips push resident springy-haired space minx microphone-wards for an arse-waggling splits-abundant Points Of View-enraging tale of transgalactic soft-porn-shenanigans with one 'Captain Strange', given a cosmic sprinkling of Kremmen-esque 'space cruiser intercom' spoken word bits, samples from Also Sprach Zarathustra and the Close Encounters four note thingy, and a modish mention of one 'Darth Vader'. Subsequent to this success, an outer spiral arm-sized schism developed and while La Brightman strove for further chart success with the wheel-reinventing Adventures Of The Love Crusader and Love In A UFO, Hot Gossip attempted to leap on another sci-fi themed bandwagon with the similarly underachieving Space Invaders. More recently, Ms. Brightman has announced her intention to bring the lyrics one step closer to reportage by going into space herself for real. Rumours that America are planning to actually traverse the desert on a horse with no name sadly cannot be confirmed.


Meco - Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band


Hilariously camped-up soaraway Hanna-Barbera-end-sting-esque sashay through the main title theme from The Unyclopedia Of Rock (or, if raining, sci-fi's most overrated franchise) as it might have been heard in The Blue Oyster from Police Academy, replete with puzzlingly-sourced genuine article lazer blasts and R2D2 blipperings, intertwined with sidesplittingly sped-up version of Figrin Da'n & The Modal Nodes' signature show-stopper sounding as though it's come straight out of a space-themed Benny Hill chase medley where he gets his head stuck in a slightly out of proportion Darth Vader mask or something. Trioculous reported to be 'getting down' with immediate effect.


Duffy Power, Victy Silva & The CPO's - Disco Round The Moon

Sadly not online anywhere, this shameless cash-in was only available to avid scoffers of KP's virulently-flavoured modishly-monickered pasty round corn snack Discos. Masterminded by cheapo foodstuff cash-in supremo John Mears - whose other opuses include something called Moveaboutalot With Arthur Lowe And His Animal Friends, and, lest we forget, the single length version of Jon Pertwee's I'm The Noodle Doodle Man jingle - Disco Round The Moon features synth-toting library music powerhouse Cy Payne, middle-bit-of-BBC-variety-show-tastic session singer extraordinaire Victy Silva, and erstwhile UK rock'n'roller Duffy Power boogieing their way through such crisp-friendly numbers as Hot Dogs And Mustard and That's The Way The Cookie Crumbles, which audaciously combine junk food endorsements with occasional flashes of flying saucer-level sci-fi references. Every bit as sleazy, antiseptic and indescribably inauthentic-sounding as you're imagining, and frankly all the better for it. You didn't get this with your Smiths Football Crazy.


Manhattan Transfer - Twilight Zone


Jazztacular Wodehouse-meets-Vidal-Sassoon standard-belters perform their usual lyric-adding instrumental-vocalising magic on that all-too-familiar four-note guitar jabbing (and, more importantly, the creepy 'angry flute' bit that followed it) and do some Studio Line From L'oreal-anticipating jagged lines on their faces, and come up with a song that appears to celebrate the actual act of watching an episode of The Twilight Zone. The video, however, seemed to be more closely modelled on the opening titles of Sapphire & Steel.


Liquid Gold - Don't Panic


Vaguely Hitchhiker-infringing sub-Dooleys disco-lite I Will Survive-alike Eurovision hopeful with plenty of lyrical references to romantic turmoil but nary a mention of The Great Green Arkleseizure, falling on the same bird twice, or "that's nothing - anyone could have a Thing Their Aunt Gave Them Where They Don't Know What It Is". Not even a half-expected mid-solo quotation from Journey Of The Sorcerer. "You're a jerk, Liquid Gold".


Federation - Blake's 7 Disco


Pulp-purloined hold-music-tacular with added vocodered Federation Guard threattage (you can tell they aren't proper because nobody shouts 'CRIMOS!') attempt at shaking a few extra coppers out of the few remaining viewers of a once-mighty TV 'Space Opera' heading rapidly for cancellation, working on the strange assumption that what their devotion to the show was REALLY missing was the opportunity to bust a few moves in a disco that they'd be unlikely ever to go to and would be unlikely ever to play this record which is probably impossible to dance to in the first place. Sadly the planned tie-in album Disco Darrow remains in the vaults.


Chris De Burgh - A Spaceman Came Travelling


Post-prog Chariots Of The Gods-riffing sword-and-sorcery-horse-flogging dishwater-singer-songwritery alienned-up reimagining of the Nativity, full to radio-smashing point with dreary space-travel-as-seen-by-Nasir-from-Robin-Of-Sherwood imagery and 'meaningful' insight about how you and I could make a difference if only we tried etc etc etc. We thought he was dull enough then, but little did we know what was just around the corner. And that all-important message that said extra-terrestrial vagabond had to impart to us all? "A-a-a-aa-a-a-aa-a-a-ah", apparently. We could have heard that from Tony Parsons!


Adam Ant - Apollo 9


Post-Puss N' Boots shark-hovering panic-fuelled image reinvention for the man who had been the biggest name in pop only months earlier, opting for an ill-advised 'Adam Ant On The Moon!' makeover whilst slowly but surely becoming as musically adrift as Major Tom. Aside from an occasional countdown which gets abandoned at 'five' anyway, it's not really that musically spaced out, although the lyrics gamely try to equate NASA's largely unremarkable third manned mission with the antics of a flightly lady friend, and that famous cosmological phrase "yabba yabba ding ding", which weirdly coincided with the surfacing of more or less the same phrase in the hated theme song of hated eight million episode animated tweeness Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds. Ahead lay Vive Le Rock...


Brian May & Friends - Star Fleet


Unlikely all-star re-recording of the hard-rocking end theme from the redubbed puppet escapades of Captain Orion and company, with May and Eddie Van Halen battling it out over who can contribute the most ludicrous guitar squiggling, and Roger Taylor (who, lest we forget, once recorded an album called Fun In Space) throwing in the odd PPA-esque bit of backing vocal chirruping. As the lyrics exist primarily to explain what's happening in the show you've, erm, just been watching, there's tons of refreshingly to-the-point stuff about sending a message out across the sky and 'the people back at Earth Control', while the video at least counteracts the expected extreme close-up May-emoting with lashings of hot suitmation antics courtesy of TV's top half-remembered big red robot, Dai-X.


The RAH Band - Clouds Across The Moon


Schmaltztacular Jupiter Moon-esque proto-It's-Cold-Outside-No-Kind-Of-Atmosphere calm-before-the-Star-Trek-The-Next-Generation-storm static-prone one way conversation between a lonely earthbound lady and her starship-employed Rimmer's Z Shift Gets It Clean beau, conducted to mercurial Barrowman-friendly jazz-funk-electro-pop backing with the 'twee' fader pushed up to maximum, and equally memorably enacted in a video apparently taking its pipes-and-stripy-tape visual cues from Galloping Galaxies!, only with that Hollywood bloke from Mannequin doing robot dancing in front of a telephone exchange standing in for Dinwiddy Snurdle. Ironically for a record set in the distant future, it doesn't get much more eighties than this.


The Firm - Star Trekkin'


Prank-friendly producers string together helium-voiced misquotes from Star Trek over the most subconscious-drillingly irritating tune in the entire history of recorded music, and watch in satirical satisfaction as it tops the charts for ice age upon ice age. Started off by infuriating all the humourless Trekkies who didn't like it when people didn't take it seriously, which made it immensely likeable, but then pretended they saw the joke and liked it all along and they got it more than everyone else got it ha ha ha its funny it is, which made it immensely detestable. Now likeable again on account of unparallelled ability to induce eye-rollment in rock bores. And indeed the sheer audacity of the video, made so cheaply and nastily that it probably went right round in the other direction and actually ended up unspending money.


Edelweiss - Starship Edelweiss


Long-forgotten widely-ignored follow-up to the bizarre KLF-inspired camptastic sample-fest Bring Me Edelweiss, with the thigh-flashing ladies and their less easy-on-the-eye male co-stars doing their own bit of Star Trekkin' across the universe for a Roddenberry-aping trip aboard the Enterprise, only with additional yodelling. The request to "beam me up to Mars", however, suggests they hadn't quite understood how it worked...

---

You can find lots more on 'The Sci-Fi That Time Forgot' in Well At Least It's Free, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

American Pie: Decoded

Don't you just hate American Pie?

No, not those sub-Porky's teen comedy film things (though they're pretty hateful too, now that you come to mention it), but the perpetually busker-endorsed song by Don McLean. Far from being the poignant portrait of post-adolescent disillusionment that it's so often portrayed as, it's actually more like intolerable whingeing from someone who never could quite get over the fact that he grew up and became too old to dance the 'jitterbug' at High School Hops while trying to look at cheerleaders' arses, and resented the fact that all those young upstarts had the temerity to like Bob Dylan and The Byrds instead of Bill Haley And The Comets, like some horrible twisted backwards version of The Wonder Years gone nightmarishly wrong.

The absolute worst thing about it is that, judging from the genuinely heartfelt Vincent, it was written by someone who should have known better (and anyway, if he hated all post-Buddy Holly music so much, why did he bother adding to it himself, especially with such a dreary effort?). Perhaps realising all this, McLean has always refused to discuss the all-too-obvious meanings behind the song's lyrics, recently commenting that "whatever it makes you think about, that's what it means to you". Well, since you put it like that...

A long, long time ago... I can still remember
This is of course just simple scene-setting, with the narrator explaining that though the events in this song took place a long time ago, he can still remember them, like some sort of superpowered Stuart Maconie listening to Back In Denim. Or, if you will, The Incredible String Band's hilariously unimpressive claim to be able to "remember quite well".

How that music used to make me smile
Lily Allen, it would seem, is a key figure in this unfolding story.

And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while
So the narrator was involved in some sort of joint artistic venture with Lily Allen, undertaken with the laudable intention to enrich the lives of the public through the medium of dance.

But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver
Unfortunately, something had gone wrong during the financial negotiations over this project, and the narrator was reduced to supplementing his income with a paper round during the coldest month of the year ("WHICH IS AUGUSTS, HA HA!!1" - Andy Parsons, yesterday).

Bad News on the doorstep
I couldn’t take one more step
Then things suddenly changed when, while delivering a paper to one particular house, he chanced upon Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson dressed as spoof Heavy Metal stars, and was so struck by this that he vowed to never again further supplement his income by stealing doorsteps and selling them on the black market.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
Furthermore, the encounter robbed him of his suddenly-not-so-impressive powers of recollection.

But something touched me deep inside
The Day The Music Died
In his confused state, he wandered home and tuned in to Radio 2, where Andrew Collins' hilarious satires of the music industry struck a chord with his recent experiences.

So bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Suddenly freshly motivated by this experience, the narrator recalls Alyson Hannigan at the front door, bidding farewell her real-life husband and fellow star of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Alexis Denisof.

Drove my Chevy to the Levy
But the Levy was dry
Alexis heads off in his car and picks up Chevy Chase, with the intention of meeting 1980s fan rabble-rouser and editor of Doctor Who Bulletin, Gary Levy, for a night of booze-fuelled revelry. However, Levy has decided to go teetotal, thus threatening to scupper their plans.

And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singing "this’ll be the day that I die, this’ll be the day that I die"
The day is saved by The Dukes Of Hazzard, who are sitting in a corner drinking a strange concoction of malt liquor and bread, and who are already so inebriated that they are unable to correctly recall world-famous Buddy Holly lyrics.

Did you write The Book Of Love?
For reasons that are not yet clear, the song begins directly addressing William Kotzwinkle, screenwriter for the Michael McKean-starring 1990 romantic comedy The Book Of Love.

And do you have faith in God above
If the Bible tells you so?
And a similar direct address is made to Richard Dawkins, off of Doctor Who. The answer is, presumably, 'no'.

Do you believe in rock ’n roll?
Can music save your mortal soul?
Time for an unexplained narrative lurch, as the action seems to have relocated to a Gospel Choir-heavy chuch.

And can you teach me how to dance real slow?
Mid-sermon, this new narrator makes the mistake of expressing his yearning to be taught to dance by Bez.

Well, I know that you’re in love with him
Cause I saw you dancing in the gym
Or perhaps it's actually Ricky Hervaid, causing a mass outbreak of 'The Fance'-copying hysteria when his hilarious comedy routine appears on a load of those MTV-friendly monitors in lavishly-appointed gynmnasiums. Bless his chubby little homophobic disablist bastard face.

You both kicked off your shoes
The TV footage inexplicably changes to a clip of Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk's performance of Love Can't Turn Around on Top Of The Pops in 1987, when overexcitable vocalist Darryl Pandy kicked his shoes off into the audience. This causes an outbreak of gym-based shoe-kicking-off, which in turn causes the two jealously-observed lovers to bond further.

Man, I dig those rhythm and blues
Still, you have to admire that crazy young persons' music, what?

I Was A Lonely Teenage Broncin’ Buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck
Dejected, the narrator heads off to see a drive-in movie, drowning his sorrows by paying visual tribute to that episode of Neighbours in which a Carnation-sporting Joe Mangel drove his 'Ute' to a blind date.

But I knew I was out of luck
The Day The Music Died
Oh dear - not even the comic stylings of Andrew Collins can lift his mood!

Now for ten years we’ve been on our own
Battered by life and love, the narrator falls in with a crowd of media-obsessed reactionaries getting angry about nothing, united by their manifesto "GRR GRR EIGHTIES COMPLEAT ROY OF THE ROVERS CD ROM OR SOMETHING".  

And Moss grows fat on a Rolling Stone
Here we explore some of the motivation for their anger; Richard Ayoade, TV's Moss From The IT Crowd, has taken to eating copies of Rolling Stone onstage as part of a routine. Apparently this makes him 'evil'.

But that’s not how it used to be
It is quite rightly pointed out that comedy hasn't always involved Richard Ayoade eating copies of top-selling music magazines. In the eighties, for example, it was more like Phil Cool drinking Citrus Spring.

When The Jester sang for the King and Queen
Or, to use another example, when Seal performed Ye Most Lambentable And Tragicce Ballad Of Hey Nonny No (Also To Be Known As Kiss From A Rose) at one of those Prince's Trust concert things they don't do any more.

In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
As the heating had broken in the venue and the stage area had become uncomfortably chilly, Seal approached The Manic Street Preachers (who were there to perform ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart) backstage and asked to borrow their lead singer's coat. As he was already sporting a ridiculous 'terrorist'-style balaclava, he was only too happy to oblige.

And a voice that came from You And Me
Tragically for Seal, the temperature is still sufficiently cold to reduce his singing voice to a croak akin to the loud child-scaring caw of Crow from You And Me. His career concludes shortly thereafter.

Oh, and while The King was looking down
The Jester stole his thorny crown
A complex allusion to the fickleness of fame, illustrated by the ironic tale of how Alias The Jester overtook King Greenfingers in the bid to become the most iconic fleetingly vogueish children's cartoon of the eighties that nobody now remembers.

The courtroom was adjourned
No verdict was returned
Though it's often difficult to interpret the cryptic allusions, American Pie is clearly not a song about the death of the innocence of the rock'n'roll era and the dark side of the myth of 'The Sixties', but rather about being bored in Britain in the eighties. This, for example, is a clear reference to top controversial judge, Judge Pickles. Bet that Mary Whitehouse Experience are sharpening their satirical claws right now! "...it's no wonder he reached that verdict when you consider how he got to the courtroom: 'Sorry I'm late everyone, I was travelling by British Rail...'".

And while Lennon read a book of Marx
Tim Lennon, the Just Seventeen photoshoot-favoured model who professed to like "rave music like Nirvana", thumbs through a biography of Hazard-hitmaker Richard Marx.

The quartet practiced in the park
While on his way to see forgotten early nineties indie no-hit wonders Candyland performing in Liverpool's non-famous Calderstones Park, as part of some Granada TV-sponsored 'mini-festival'.

And we sang Dirges In The Dark
The Day The Music Died
This week, Andrew Collins introduces an hilarious and timely Bruce Springsteen parody.

Helter Skelter in a summer swelter
A coded message to Charles Manson. About Charles Manson.

The Byrds flew off with a fallout shelter
Back to the eighties, and production work on top nuclear melodrama Threads is famously halted when a sixties pop group attempting a revival tour steal a key part of the scenery and smuggle it onto an aeroplane.

Eight Miles High and Falling fast
Finally we find out what the Lily Allen collaboration would have been - a speeded-up medley of minor hits by Cathy Dennis and The Byrds.

It landed foul on the grass
The players tried for a forward pass
Overwhelmed by eighties ennui, the narrator opts for a boredom-relieving game of Match Day on the ZX Spectrum, but falls foul of the bug that causes the ball to permanently disappear when it lands on a certain area of pixilated 'grass'.

With The Jester on the sidelines in a cast
Further Spectrum-related woe ensues when the computer crashes, and a graphic of Alias The Jester from his own game briefly appears mashed in with that black screen before it says '(C) 1982 Sinclair Research Limited'.

Now the half-time air was sweet perfume
While the Sergeants played a marching tune
That'll be those 'drugs', wheeled out to accompany the unecessary overblown twentieth anniversary celebrations of the release of Captain Rutter's Only Darts Club Band. Skin up, 'Dinners'!

We all got up to dance
Oh, but we never got the chance
Cause the players tried to take the field
The marching band refused to yield
Graham Bright MP tables a motion to outlaw 'raves', while Tim Lennon sobs into his Richard Marx book. This is 'meaningful', this bit.

Do you recall what was revealed?
The Day The Music Died
Andrew Collins does some of those wacky spoof music news headlines.

Oh, and there we were all in one place
The narrator then recalls his days as part of 'Rubber Bucket', the large ad-hoc choir of squatters assembled to record the protest song We Are All Living In One Place at the behest of - yikes! - Gary Glitter. 'Uncle' says: "Commission x 8!".  

A generation Lost In Space
While his peers start camping around in front of painted backdrops yelping "In-deed! Spare me the barb, major!" and being unconvincingly spooked by unconvincing owl-esque aliens.

With no time left to start again
He realises the song sounds pretty bloody stupid thus far, but with this amount of lyrics set down already, not to mention a potentially angry blogger who's spent hours on it up to this point, starting all over again might not really be good for his health.

So come on, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack flash sat on a candlestick
So he opts to start talking about currently popular topics instead. For example, the Top TV Bisexual antics of Top TV Bisexual John Barrowman.

Cause fire is the devil’s only friend
Or Facebook, and in particular the fact that Satan has his own personal page, but the only person who will accept his Friend Request is 'Fire'.

And as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
Oh, hang on - Barrowman's latest stage musical has been invaded by a dystopian rapper protesting about his lack of representation in the genre, and the audience are not happy about it...

No angel born in hell
Could break that Satan’s spell
...while David Boreanaz also refuses to add The Horned One as a friend...

And as the flames climbed high into the night to light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight The Day The Music Died
...still, it's time for Andrew Collins - required listening in Hell!

I met a girl who sang the blues
Just like TV's 'Oops On Mars, It Was All A Dream!(TM). The narrator comes to, and realises that while he's been hallucinating all of the above, Lily Allen and her 'crew' have packed up and left. Stumbling out of the studio in a daze, he chances upon Amy Winehouse/Katie Melua/Joss Stone/One Of Those.

And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
Recalling Martyn Lewis' bizarre lambasting of the BBC for concentrating on 'Bad' News, he asks for some more upbeat examples of current affairs as a way of cheering up. Amy/Katy/Joss/One Of is not impressed.

I went down to the sacred store
Where I’d heard the music years before
But the man there said the music wouldn’t play
So, just like Sam Tyler, he seeks out the record shop he used to frequent, but none of their equipment will work while he's in there. Which is a spooky motif that can be conveniently forgotten about when the rubbish ending is bolted on.

And in the streets, the children screamed
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed
Dystopian Rap's own Graffiti Poet takes his unique brand of nude lyricism to the streets - the public respond as might be expected.

But not a word was spoken
The church bells all were broken
In his last gasp of confusion before keeling over, the narrator wonders why the church bells are no longer 'talking' to him. Then they go all wobbly and warped sounding, like that church that was amusingly revealed to employ a hidden tape recorder rather than real bells when the tape wore out.

And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The Day The Music Died
And The Holy Trinity go on a weekend break to Devon for a spot of Andrew Collins-listening. THE END.

Doctor Who And The Utopia

Continuing the run of Doctor Who reviews, here's the episode of series three that I was originally asked to review. It's far from being the best of the revived show, or even of that particular series (and you can find more about my overarching views on such matters in an epic-length overview of the entire Russell T. Davies era in my book Well At Least It's Free), but it remains the one that I enjoyed the most and the review speaks for itself, really. Incidentally, this version here restores a couple of gags that were cut for being 'flippant'. Quite what anyone had expected from a review originally entitled Back Once Again With The Renegade Master, then, is a bit of a mystery...

Trailers used to be such simple things. As any number of 'old skool' Doctor Who DVDs will attest, the average TV show was once content to promote itself with a short and usually not that exciting clip, with minimal assistance from an avuncular voiceover man and a day and time caption. If they wanted you to tune in later that evening, they never felt the need to include anything more dramatic than that bizarre scene with Sylvester McCoy listening to an apple.

Then it all changed. Some time in the eighties, American TV networks started to ape the bombastic cliffhanging style of trailer favoured by big-screen blockbusters, heavy on dramatic music, fast edits and clips suggesting heaps of nailbiting tension to come, even if it later turned out that there wasn't. It took a long time for the influence to filter through to UK TV (although, weirdly, JNT had an unbroadcast go for Doctor Who’s twenty fifth anniversary in 1988), but filter through it did, and now even the most innocuous of shows is pushed to the viewer with blaring sounds and dizzying images. And such is the need to pack them with glimpses of things to come that, thanks to a short break in transmission (which people complained about, even though it was a fraction of the length of the ones they had in the sixties), viewers had their first sight of Captain Jack doing his slow-motion tribute to Del Boy falling through the bar over two months before Utopia aired.

Two months is a long time in television. Well, not really, but it’s enough time for rumours to spread and hype to spiral out of control. Captain Jack’s The Master! No, he’s The Face Of Boe! I think he's The Shrivenzale! The returning villains in this story will be The Monoids! Or possibly The Pirate Captain! 'Harold Saxon' is Gaelic for 'You are my honeyhoneyhoneysuckle, I am your beeeeeee'! Claudia Winkleman will explode! OK, so frankly for believing such self-invented tripe the rumourmongers deserved not to enjoy the story, but the hype is a more serious problem, especially when the two-month gap contains the superlative Human Nature/Family Of Blood, the enormously fun Blink, and the at least watchable 42. That's quite a lot to live up to.

Even aside from such contextual considerations, the omens for Utopia were not good. The Radio Times, always so quick to talk up the latest episode of Doctor Who in amongst all their witless cheerleading for the latest join-the-dots ITV 9pm drama and whatever show this week features unreconstituted bigotry cunningly disguised as 'deliciously non-PC', had no hesitation in describing it as a 'clunker'. The preview clips at the end of Blink weren't overly pulse-quickening either; although to be fair, once you'd actually seen the episode it became clear that this was probably down to them not wanting to give too much away.

Well, one viewer's 'clunker' is another viewer's exhiliarating edge-of-the-seat television, and even though there isn't room to start singing the praises of The Underwater Menace here that's also a description that applies neatly to Utopia. Any story that starts with Captain Jack clinging to the Tardis whilst hurtling through the time vortex and continues with Rene Zagger putting the skills he learned as Grange Hill's champion runner Mike Bentley to good use whilst being pursued by savage-looking tribal characters who looked as though they'd just run head-first into a still-drying example of those 'ethnic woodcut' paintings that you used to get everywhere in the eighties is always going to be pretty far removed from clunkerdom, no matter what those with access to preview tapes might argue.

Although clearly intended from the outset as a build-up to the climactic closing two-parter, Utopia was no mere scene-setter and some thought had clearly gone into making it a worthwhile episode in its own right, something that the production team have noticeably skimped on for previous outings. In fact, the episode was pretty much a distillation of everything that the new series does best - a hostile dying planet, a saboteur driven purely by primal rage, a tense 'this must be done in the right order' scene overlaid with humour, a comic relief character with an amusingly irritating turn of phrase, you name it and it was slammed together in this one single episode that shook just like the starbound rocket did on take off.

These thrills were effectively just a sideshow though - something that was subtly underlined by the way that the fate of the Utopia-bound travellers was so quickly and totally forgotten about - and the main purpose of the episode was to reintroduce The Master. Of course, it's true that many viewers will have guessed long ago that the bearded jackanapes was likely to find his black-clad way back into the series eventually, but who would have guessed at him being both Professor Yana and Harold Saxon? And the element of surprise didn't end there either - despite it having stared the entire audience in the face for weeks on end, the revelation that he had survived the Time War and escaped subsequent detection by using one of those Time Lord pocket watches came as a real jolt with a genuine sense of nervous realisation creeping in throughout the scene. The intercutting between Yana's initials and The Face Of Boe's ominous proclamation was an inspired move, as was the sound of Anthony Ainley and Roger Delgado's voices issuing from the watch which must have caused a great number of older viewers to shudder as if they were still behind that imaginary sofa that nobody ever actually hid behind.

Not that anyone should expect anything less from an actor of his calibre, but Derek Jacobi's performance was little short of, erm, masterful, beautifully sketching the slow and gradual degeneration from the benevolent, kindly Professor Yana (a performance that called to mind no less avuncular a figure than Douglas Adams' long-forgotten animated friend of the animals Dr. Snuggles) to a new version of The Master with one foot in malevolent snarling - his sneering dismissal of the idea of 'Utopia' was genuinely chilling - and the other in a studied childishness ("killed by an insect... a girl!"). Equally impressively John Simm seemed to immediately take the post-regeneration character off in an entirely different direction, coming across as somewhere between an arrogant politician and a sinister Timothy Claypole, especially when mocking the old series' habit of having The Master arrogantly reveal his plans in full in order to engineer his own defeat, although he'd better have lost that tendency to lapse into a Coogan/Pegg-style That Voice when called on to deliver a 'mocking' line by the time the next episode rolls around. Meanwhile, holding her own against these two heavyweights (and the not-that-bad-on-the-acting-front-either regular cast too) was Chipo Chung, who managed to imbue the faintly ridiculous Chantho with a genuine sympathy and depth that made her fate all the more shocking.

Anyway, never mind The Master, it was great to see Captain Jack back in the thick of the show, and indeed effectively back in character, having been slightly overshadowed in Torchwoodby the more interesting Toshiko and Ianto, the more foul-mouthed Gwen, and the more distractingly quick-cart-him-off-to-acting-school Owen (mind you, it's a shame that none of them will be appearing in the last two episodes; it'd be a great crossover, especially as they could be comically unfazed by the dimensions of the Tardis interior). This was exactly the right moment for John Barrowman to be back straddling that fine line between comedy and white-knuckle-ride excitement, as the series has been subtly and cleverly moving in that direction throughout. As indeed did the episode itself, slowly but surely ratcheting up the tension until the climactic final few minutes, when the audience held their breath en masse, and for once Murray Gold's incidental music didn't sound at all excessively dramatic or over the top. And extra points for the erstwhile musical contributor to Radio 1's short-lived comedy 'rock history' The Knowledge for sneaking in a subtle echo of theTorchwood theme, although forgetting to do likewise with Dudley Simpson's old 'Master Theme' from the Pertwee era was a real missed opportunity.

Less impressive was the big reveal of Captain Jack's post-The Parting Of The Ways pre-Torchwood backstory. Not in any way because of the content - in fact, it was nice for once to have an explanation that both made sense and fitted exactly with everything else that has already been established - nor indeed because of the direction, acting or scripting of the scenes themselves. Rather it was down to the overwrought gravitas applied whenever the subject was touched on in Torchwood, which hinted at something far darker and jolting than simply 'I had to wait around for a very long time'. Still, that's more Torchwood's problem than it is Doctor Who's, and in any case it was far better we had that than "I'm The Doctor's son... and also General Grugger!".

On top of everything else, Utopia was followed by a tremendous instalment of Doctor Who Confidential. Even just a fortnight ago, the words 'tremendous', 'Doctor', 'Confidential' and 'Who' seemed like words that were scientifically unable to appear in the same sentence as each other. David Tennant's bizarre hallucinogenic diversion into trying to create a visual version of those old World Distributors annual articles about the making of the series aside, it's been pretty much unwatchable for the most part this run. Well, alright, maybe that's a tad harsh, but it's not unfair to say that by and large they run out of anything genuinely interesting to say within a third or less of its ludicrously overlong running time, filling up the rest with members of the production team saying very little about nothing in particular.

Some would doubtless argue that Doctor Who is a special case that deserves special treatment even if it does mean that length outweighs interestingness. Well, it isn't, and how exciting would the 'classic' series (and indeed the all-too-rare 'making of' features that accompanied it, fondly remembered purely because they were so few and as a result so heavily concentrated in terms of content) have been had every episode been followed by interminable footage of JNT trying to explain why nobody watched The Two Doctors? Not to mention if the practice had been extended to the rest of the schedules and audiences passim had thrilled to Blake's 7 Confidential, Beachcombers Confidential, Captain Zep Confidential and Sorry Mate, I Didn't See You! Confidential. Doctor Who Confidential has little to say and a lot of time to say it in, turning what could be a cracking post-show shot of trivia into something that's basically a bit of a chore to get through. Thankfully this time, with three articulate actors who haven't been in the rest of the series on hand, things get a little more interesting. If Simm, Jacobi and Barrowman aren't on commentary duties when the DVD release rolls around, somebody really will have missed a trick.

We've come so far technologically since the days when it was all done live and in black and white, but some things never change, and just for a second, audiences watching in 2007 must have felt the same sort of jangle of nerves as their counterparts did when witnessing a hapless spaceman chancing upon the Daleks and their ridiculously-costumed pals plotting total universal conquest in another 'teaser episode' over four decades previously. Sometimes trailers do give away far too much, but nothing - least of all a leaping Barrowman - had hinted at just how much impact Utopia would have. Hype means nothing when its subject exceeds all expectations, nor indeed when it points towards the following two episodes being something rather spectacular through sheer on-screen action alone. And who would have thought this sort of praise would ever be heaped on an episode written by Russell T Davies?

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.