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.

Doctor Who And The Human Nature (Incorporating Doctor Who And The Family Of Blood)

Another of the reviews of 'New' Doctor Who, and yes, at last, it's the fabled long-lost look at the two-parter Human Nature/The Family Of Blood - pretty much the best that the revived series has had to offer - which was written at the last minute as a favour when somebody else's planned review fell through, owing to it having been written from the perspective of Kelvin Carpenter from EastEnders or something. No, me neither. Anyway, this was done in about an hour, and while as a result it's arguably a bit rough-edged and doesn't go into much depth, it also almost accidentally captures the sheer excitement of just how good those episodes were. Better still, the original file actually went 'missing' for a while, leading to a load of tongue-in-cheek silliness about it being a 'lost classic' etc. In fact, for a while, in true Telesnap style all that existed of it were some bits that were later reworked into a massive overview of the whole Russell T. Davies era, as featured in my book Well At Least It's Free. Incidentally, the suggested titles for this were There's Nothing Wrong With Human Nature and We're The Scarecrow People (And We've Got Lots In Common With Who), late eighties indie references which were perhaps sensibly rejected. And in the absence of any easily traceable electronic version, this has been typed in again by hand... you don't get that with your 'My Marks For This Season Out Of Ten (None Below Seven)' signatures on Outpost Gallifrey!

Scarecrows - love them or hate them, you j... oh, alright, it's never going to be 'love them', is it? No matter how hard certain parties may have tried over the years to persuade us all otherwise, there's something insurmountably sinister about them, and there's just no way around that. Whether defending puppet elephants against witches intent on stealing their manners, plugging Linda McCartney's range of taste-free dishes, being sung about by Pink Floyd, or just knocking on a rain-lashed cottage door in search of some Knorr Farmhouse Soup, even the most ostensibly loveable of strawheads has never quite managed to get past that barrier of creepiness-by-association.

Even Doctor Who's past dalliances with crow-scarers, from Jon Pertwee's celebrated stint as literary crop-bothered Worzel Gummidge to that TV Comic strip where Troughton and Farmer Glenlock Hogan ran up against some walking scarecrows that turned out to be the Time Lords in disguise, haven't quite been able to evade it. Yes, Worzel may well have been a gentle soul with no more malevolent a thought in his head than where the next cup of cake and slice of tea was coming from, but as many erstwhile younger viewers were terrified as were entranced by him; indeed, Jon Pertwee used to bafflingly show off about this in interviews at the flimsiest hint of an excuse. As such, the big question is that if even a show that attempted to depict scarecrows as a genial and community-spirited bunch couldn't quite pull that off, why did nobody working on Doctor Who ever think it was a good idea to use them for pure scariness' sake?

Well, now they have done, and there's a big scary-looking scarecrow glowering out from the cover of the Radio Times, urging the viewing public to tune in to this Saturday's instalment of Doctor Who. It's quite possible, of course, that this could have the exact opposite effect on some viewers, but as front-page enticements to watch go it could hardly be bettered. And good thing too, as the two-parter in question, Human Nature/The Family Of Blood, was Doctor Who at its absolute finest.

Mind you, that cover was only really needed to pull in your average viewer-about-town; long-term watchers of the series will have already made a note in their diary on account of it having the title Human Nature and being written by Paul Cornell (and, um, the fact that they would be watching it anyway regardless). For those of you reading who aren't aware of this already - and let's be realistic about this, probably most of the people who are watching the revived series won't be - Human Nature by Paul Cornell was originally part of the long-lost 'New Adventures' project, basically a series of fan-written novels that sprang up to fill the televison series-sized gap when it looked like Doctor Who really was finished for good. What with the blockbusting return to the small screen and everything, this probably seems rather a quaint and puzzling idea to anyone who wasn't around at the time, but then again the New Adventures weren't exactly universally well recieved back then either. A handful of authors were, however, very good indeed, and one of them was Paul Cornell; if you want evidence of this, look no further than the fact that while the majority of books in the series can be picked up second hand for a couple of pence, his - including the original version of Human Nature, now change hands for those time-honoured 'dizzying sums'. In some ways it's surprising that Russell T. Davies should be tipping the hat to a decidedly less successful previous attempt at reviving Doctor Who, but if ever there was a non-televisual story that deserved to have something more substantial made of it (and didn't feature Frobisher), then Human Nature was it.

Without wanting to give too many plot details away, on the off chance that anyone out there is still seeking refuge from 'spoilers', Human Nature concerns The Doctor's attempts to evade a powerful adversary by passing himself off as a human - a teacher at an early Twentieth Century boys' school, to be precise - through the auspieces of a mysterious fob watch which allows Time Lords to temporarily assume the biological structure of Earthlings. He has of course posed as plain old 'Doctor John Smith' on many previous occasions, always taking care not to give the game away by constantly smugly hinting that he might not in fact be human after all, this was the real deal and the first ever real opportunity to explore this much-vaunted 'human side' to the character. And what's that human side like? Well, a bit... Doctorish, really.

The question of what precisely constitutes 'human nature' is one that has been touched on by Doctor Who many times - including, far less successfully, earlier in this same series - but it's through exploring it in a more subtle and less melodramatic context that this story manages to come up with a halfway convincing 'answer'. There is indeed far more to The Doctor than his supposed 'humanity', which is treated here as simply one facet of a more complicated character. The period setting also allowed for some interesting points to be touched on; the realistic depiction of Martha as a sort of reluctantly 'tolerated' ethnic associate of an academic said much more than any amount of heavy-handed moralising, while the salute to those who fought in the First World War was all the more touching for refusing to go down the Blackadder Goes Forth route (or, indeed, over the Blackadder Goes Forth top, in whichever sense you want to take that) and treating it as a matter-of-fact reality of one young (and later old) man's life. In fact, while this may not have been the production team's actual intention, at a time when it's becoming more and more difficult to convince younger generations of the importance of events like Remembrance Sunday, it's probably this kind of approach that stands the best chance of continuing to get the message across.

Sadly, much of this seems to have been overlooked in the post-transmission rush to bicker over the rights and wrongs of how The Doctor ultimately dealt with his pursuers, and whether or not this officially consituted some sort of 'radical' 'departure'. What's odd about this idea of the 'darker' Doctor - which, this time around, seems to involve something more substantial than just his coat changing colour a bit - is that fans seem determined that the current approach is somehow at loggerheads with everything seen in the series prior to now, although when pressed on this, seemingly all they can come up with is the Third Doctor getting a bit narked when the Brigadier elected to blow up the Silurians' caves. Tennant and RTD's take on the character isn't necessarily any 'darker' than when previous Doctors were dispassionately dispensing with Drahvins, Zygons, Gelth or the Hand of Omega-wielding Davros to their self-inflicted fates, and the First Doctor of course was positively ruthless. What we should all be mulling over, of course, is just how closely the conclusion 'borrowed' from that of Adventure Four of Sapphire & Steel. But anyway...

As a two-part story, this was the first time that the revived series has really taken advantage of the opportunity to revisit the cliffhanging days of old, with the actual story taking up its extended running time by weight of force rather than feeling like a good deal of padding with a tacked-on 'crisis' in the middle. Which in a sense actually made it superior to vast swathes of the cliffhanging days of old. Yet it's difficult to praise these episodes without detracting from the fact that Paul Cornell did much of the groundwork for them back in a time when nobody was getting to do any cliffhanging at all, and without the encouragement and pressure of huge viewing figures to spur him on either, though through accepting (well, in a roundabout fashion) the better end of the New Adventures and indeed that troublesome Paul McGann 'era' as welcome facets of the show's history, Russell T. Davies has shown himself to be a lot less haughtily proprietorial about his own reinvention of the show than many of its fans are.

And quite right too - we could debate their literary merits and position in the Doctor Who 'canon' until entire episodes of The Sensorites have elapsed, but the truth of the matter is that, like them or hate them, the books and so many similar projects besides played their small part in keeping interest in the series going during the wilderness years, making it just that crucial bit more easy for some overenthusiastic showrunner to start insisting that it should be brought back in the face of massive audience and industry apathy. Never mind the legions of independent producers and their harebrained ideas for relaunching the series - it was Paul Cornell, along with Steve Lyons, Gareth Roberts, Mark Gatiss, Gary Russell and all those other skilled and imaginative writers who kept that faintest glimmer of hope in the future of Doctor Who glimmering, and what better way to salute them than with two whole episodes of outstanding television drama.

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.