The Other Doctor Who Roundup

Over the course of nine weeks, the Drama Channel ran a series of 'classic' Doctor Who stories - one for each Doctor, edited together into a single 2-hour omnibus - which, coming so close after the latest series of 'New Who', gave me an excellent opportunity to compare and contrast the two versions of the series. One of the things that has bugged me about the detractors of the new series is the way it's treated as inferior in every way to the original series. Also, in particular, this latest series has copped some flak for being 'overly focused on death and horror'. Personally - and ignoring my personal bête noire, the David Tennant era - I have found the series to be at least on a par with the original, and frequently better... Though I have often expressed the opinion that the stories could be longer - multi-part stories, like the original series, rather than a series of self-contained episodes, vaguely serving a series-long arc. As far as the death angle goes, I thought the series has always had that element and, whether by accident or design, the Drama Channel re-runs have supported what I remember.

It started with the William Hartnell-era story called simply The Aztecs, in which the very first crew of the TARDIS find themselves among people for whom human sacrifice is a common occurrence, and one of their number is mistaken for a goddess. There's at least a couple of fistfights (thankfully not involving Hartnell) and certainly the implication of death by poison and by sacrificial dagger, as well as one character rather dramatically killing himself for reasons of religious observance. Some of the sets are wobbly and the fights are deeply unconvincing (I doubt fight trainers or choreographers were common or easily available in those days), but the story is solid and there are a couple of quite funny moments - such as the Doctor not understanding that asking a woman to share hot chocolate with him amounted to a proposal of marriage. The whole bit about people from a 'more civilised' future trying to change the 'barbaric ancient culture' was a bit obvious, more than a little daft, and clearly doomed to failure, but one must remember that Doctor Who was originally intended to be 'Edutainment', so the examination of Aztec beliefs and a comparison to our own was inevitable.

The second story was Tomb of the Cybermen, in which Patrick Troughton's Doctor gatecrashes an archaeological expedition into the titular tomb... only to find the expedition is more than meets the eye, and the couple funding it have a very deadly hidden agenda. Again, it's quite violent and, while it's difficult to take the Cybermen of that era - or the ridiculously cute Cybermats - at all seriously, there's certainly a lot of implied peril. When the hidden agenda is revealed, things go all kinds of wrong, people die, but the Doctor is eventually able to save the day. Sadly, his companion in this one was one of the 'helpless screamer' variety, and not a patch on the original crew, but the story and supporting cast were pretty good, even if there was a bit of racial stereotyping... The sets were decent, but still pretty wobbly and it was obvious, by this point, Doctor Who was no longer considered 'Edutainment'. This can only be a good thing.

Spearhead from Space was John Pertwee's very dramatic introduction as the Doctor and, while he had been stranded on Earth by the politicians of his homeworld (or rather, the budget cuts and restrictions forced upon it from the top dogs at the Beeb), it still managed to be pretty imaginative and horrific. While I don't find the Autons especially scary, their system of replacing people was a little disturbing, and the 'waxwork' museum was straight out of a horror movie. The only really disturbing thing was this story's early take on the Nestene Consciousness (which only ever returned in the first ever episode of the reboot, Rose, featuring Christopher Ecclestone as the Doctor). Once it had been revealed in its plastic box, it pulsed like some enormous hideous space anus. Its tentacles, when it attacked the Doctor, were a bit rubbish though. I tend to like any episode featuring the Brigadier, so this episode made for a particularly strong intro. It's also notable for the brief glimpse you get of Jon Pertwee's tattoo in the shower scene. Yes, I said 'shower scene'.

While Jon Pertwee's time in the TARDIS - or, more accurately, out of it - tended toward Hammer Horror, it was Tom Baker's era that basically pulled out all the stops, and Pyramids of Mars could easily have functioned well as a pure horror story without any of its sci-fi trappings, with its tale of an ancient 'god' trapped on Mar and plotting its escape. Some of the (remarkably few) special effects were pretty ropey by today's standards, and some plot elements were a little vague (how did an archaeological dig in Egypt wind up inside a Martian prison?) and the Robo-Mummies looked terrible and moved clumsily - no doubt due to the clumsiness of the costume as well as the continued lack of any kind of choreographer. Interesting to see the Doctor disguising himself in one of the mummy costumes... but how did that work, if they were robots? It was a treat to see Elizabeth Sladen - who died back in 2011 - as companion Sarah Jane Smith, particularly when she got to play sniper wearing a pretty white dress in this one.

Peter Davison took over from Tom Baker while I was watching the show as a nipper so, while I still consider Baker to be 'my Doctor', Davison was the one I saw more of until the show started getting re-run. He's a bit of a contentious Doctor, since he was the youngest at the time - about 30 when he first got the role - and was perceived by a former colleague of mine to be a rather weak and pathetic Doctor. Earthshock showed him to be just as distant, arrogant and mercurial as some of the more recent Doctors, particularly in his treatment of Adric. Weirdly, this was a story I had quite strong memories of from the first time I saw it, in its episodic form, though I had completely forgotten the utterly incongruous presence of Beryl Reid in the cast. The scene where a Cyberman walks through a closed door (which had had its molecular structure altered by some sort of beam), only to become trapped part-way when the Doctor connects the spacecraft's antimatter containment system to the door (SCIENCE! This got quite a clever explanation - something along the lines of 'antimatter cannot be contained physically, so computer control constantly adjusts the molecular structure of something-or-other to keep the antimatter contained, so connecting the system to the altered door brought it back to its normal, solid form'). I also remembered to Doctor taking out one of the Cybermen by rubbing Adric's gold badge into its chest (Cybermen, we were told, are allergic to gold). This episode had a clever, if bittersweet finale, in that Adric sacrificed himself to save Earth, inadvertently causing the extinction of the dinosaurs in our distant past. It's also interesting that the series of omnibus episodes as shown a fair bit of the evolution of the Cybermen (that is, their costumes), here in their accordion-chested, moonbooted phase. Of course, for me, the best thing about seeing this story was that, back in the day, I had a massive crush on Nyssa, played by Sarah Sutton.

For many viewers, Colin Baker's appearance as the Doctor following Davison was the beginning of the end for the show. From the harlequin costume/Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat to the increasing wobbliness of the sets, it became obvious that the BBC no longer took the show at all seriously and Vengence on Varos (amusingly referenced in The Five(ish) Doctors) was pretty terrible in a lot of ways. The sight of a topless, oiled-up Jason Connery, chained to a wall as he pretended to be in the throes of torture by some kind of gun dragged on just that little bit too long to be entirely decent, the special effects were lazy (most of the budget must have been spent on the little electric carts the guards drove around in), and the Doctor was basically secondary to the story, with barely any real influence on the outcome. The supporting cast were theoretically good... but seemed to be acting as if they were on stage rather than in front of a camera.

But if the Colin Baker era was the beginning of the end, Sylvester McCoy's time had the death knell ringing in the background the whole time, and it rang loud in Battlefield. With scenes of alien 'knights' with an Arthurian schtick arriving on Earth much like the first batch of Cybertronians in the original live action TransFormers movie (though the effects here were obviously not as polished), a very confused plot involving a convoy of UNIT weapons (though only incidentally), a submerged alien spacecraft and Excalibur, as well as a scene than very nearly proved fatal for Sophie Aldred, rather than just the character she played, it was far from being one of the best stories even of the time. Add the possibility that the Doctor is actually Merlin (can't wait to see if Moffat ever references that!) and a new, grumpy, female Brigadier and you could be forgiven for thinking the story was written as a full-on comedy.

One might expect a retrospective to finish there, but Drama decided to screen Paul McGann's first and - until the 50th Anniversary - only outing as the Doctor, in the terrible, terrible American-made TV movie. I'm glad Sylvester McCoy argued himself a bigger part, as it felt more like a proper handover, but so little of the story actually made sense, and one could make a drinking game out of the number of times McGann had to spout a non-sequitur added to the script simply to remind apparently ADHD US audiences that "that thur mayun ain'tnt hyoomin... he's a ay-leen!", only you'd be paralytic within a few minutes just from his random outbursts of "I have two hearts!". Internal consistency was at an all-time low in this adaptation, and it introduced the idea of the Doctor being half human on his mother's side for no reason whatsoever (I believe this is now referred to as one of the Doctor's many fibs, intended to make it easier for his companion to relate to him. Sadly, his companion was just as implausible... though her daft surgery attire has only comparatively recently been trumped - on a weekly basis - in Body of Proof. I don't necessarily object to the daft resurrection of the Master (it's no more daft than what RTD did in his 2-part swan song), or even Eric Robert's impressively hammy performance, but the idea of the McGuffin within the TARDIS which is capable of destroying the world under certain circumstances, but which - under those same circumstances - will also allow the Master to steal the Doctor's remaining regenerations was very poorly conceived.

So, in the aftermath of that fairly decent little retrospective of original Who, I feel reassured that the style and the content hasn't changed that significantly. It's more polished, the effects are infinitely superior, but the single episode story format really isn't doing it any favours. The original series told a story over the course of, on average, about four half-hour episodes. The new series tries to tell a story over the course of forty-five minutes. Sometimes it succeeds, but far more frequently it could do with more time to really flesh out the situations and the secondary characters.

This year's Christmas special was only fifteen minutes longer than usual, but it felt just about right. The storyline hovered somewhere between Inception, Alien, The Thing and Miracle on 34th Street (the latter three being directly referenced within the story, one way or another) and was certainly an interesting take on the idea of a Christmas special. At first, it seemed a small and intimate tale, along the lines of Matt Smith's first Christmas special, A Christmas Carol, but later hinted at something far bigger and more deadly (the title of the episode was 'Last Christmas', after all) though I felt it did so in a way that belied the greater threat. I'm fairly happy with the way it ended, but I can't help wondering what it had been like if, while riding alone with Santa, when the camera zoomed in on Clara's face, it then zoomed out again to reveal Danny Pink - in his Santa suit - driving the sleigh, offering Clara a very different choice that would have tested her motivation. It would have made for a very different ending, to be sure, but perhaps a more poignant one.

I did like Nick Frost's take on a rather ambiguous Santa Claus (did he exist?), though he reminded me a lot of Richard Attenborough, circa Jurassic Park (or, perhaps more appropriately, the Miracle remake), and it was great to see Dan Starkey out of his Strax makeup.

I now have high hopes for the next series of Doctor Who... as long as the writers can steer clear of having the Doctor continually tell people to "shut up!". If they can also see their way clear to giving us more multi-episode stories with more actual story and setup, and bringing back Michelle Gomez as the Master, I'll be a very happy chappy.

The Dawning Realisation...

...Is that I'm really not going to finish what was originally looking like a four-part epic around the holiday my girlfriend and I took to the States earlier in the year. I had good intentions, and had it planned out reasonably well - one post about the two theme parks we visited (Disney and Universal), one about the shopping and eating out we did, and the final one being a more general thing about the transport, accommodation, pool, and our last half-day in LA before getting a plane back home and suffering jet lag for about a week.

While I still remember it well enough, I just can't bring myself to write about it in the sort of detail I'd originally intended. Suffice it to say, then, that it was an excellent break, I didn't get too nervous about the prospect of navigating a strange city using frankly terrible public transport (let's be clear: the buses are pretty great - they're quick and cover a lot of ground - they're just not frequent enough and some routes are quite patchy). The food was excellent, though we both ended up skipping some meals as there was so much food in each one we had. We didn't do as much proper sightseeing as we'd intended, largely because of the trouble with public transport. We didn't get to see as much of my girlfriend's best friend as we'd have liked due to her work commitments. On the upside, while my girlfriend's anxiety and depression symptoms - particularly lethargy - did manifest themselves quite strongly on a couple of occasions, the effects seemed - to me - to be very much short term, and didn't hinder her overall enjoyment of the holiday. And it's not as if Griffith Park or the observatory are going anywhere anytime soon.

A few things deserve honourable mentions, however:

The day at Disney was absolutely awesome, though the queues are terrible. Just getting into the park took longer than it needed to due to comparatively short queues for tickets that took ages to move. Seriously, I do not understand how it can take some people upwards of ten minutes to buy tickets - even for a family group - when all it takes is announcing how many tickets you wish to purchase, whether or not you want the optional extras (tip: yes, you do want the front-of-queue passes) and, at least if you sound foreign, telling them whether or not it's your first visit (which gets you a badge to display proudly as you wander around the park). It took my girlfriend and I maybe two minutes to get our tickets after at least half an hour of queuing, with only three or four groups ahead of us.

Weirdly, there are LA street gangs that associate themselves with Disney characters. It sounds like a joke one of the locals might play on a tourist but, sure enough, you'll see groups of extensively tattooed people wandering round the park, dressed in stereotypical street gang style, but with Mickey Mouse (for example) embroidered on their jackets or tattooed in strategic locations, where any other gang might have something a bit more traditional/threatening...

Both my girlfriend and I felt that the best ride of the day was the Indiana Jones Adventure though, even in this day and age, more sedate experiences like Pirates of the Carribbean (with its somewhat incongruous and obviously hastily-added Captain Jack Sparrow animatronics) are still pretty cool and enjoyable. I'm a little upset that we missed every single opportunity throughout the day to meet Honda's Asimo robot, but it's not as if we were ever idle. There is honestly so much to do there, let alone just wandering around and observing the many actors portraying famous characters, that one could easily spend a few days just at Disney... and the daily finales of fireworks and shows could probably stand up to repeat viewings from different vantage points.

By contrast, Universal is pretty tiny... and the newest ride - TransFormers: The Ride-3D - is probably the best of the 'traditional' theme park experiences (or perhaps I show a bias here?). However, the studio tour mixes in factual stuff about the studios and more motion ride shenanigans, including a 360° 3D section based around King Kong and some first-hand experience of practical special effects. If you're efficient in your planning - and have the VIP passes - you can almost certainly see everything it has to offer in one day. We ended the day watching the Waterworld show, which had a brilliant bit of pre-show audience participation, though it did lead to a couple of English tourists of the sunburnt variety getting very vocally upset when a bucket of water got chucked at them. Not sure I understand why, considering the seats they'd occupied were so clearly labelled "SOAK ZONE". While the show is very well done, the most impressive thing for me was that, at 20 minutes, it was far more efficient at telling its story than the movie it's based upon.

Weirdly, I ended up buying more TransFormers toys at Universal (three) than I did at either Toys'R'Us (one) or Target (one), and we were advised against going to Walmart, so I can't say much about them.

Even more weirdly, my girlfriend and I were mistaken (for the second time in our two-year relationship) for father and daughter. As we entered the theatre for the Despicable Me Minions ride, we found ourselves in different blocks of seats (each row has twelve seats, with an aisle between each group of four, and we were preceded by a group of three). An older couple - also English, if I remember correctly - offered to move back one seat, suggesting that I could "sit with one of your children". More than a little embarrassing... not that it stopped me taking them up on the offer.

One of the biggest advantages of staying with my girlfriend's best friend was that her appartment complex has two swimming pools. I haven't been swimming in decades, and had to buy a pair of swimming shorts before we went out there since it's been so long. I think my last pair of trunks had my first/middle school swimming badges sewn onto them. Swimming was a great way to start the day and, once I'd plucked up the courage to join my girlfriend in her morning swim, I began to regret not getting to it sooner. That said, considering how wheezy I got after a short time in the pool, never even completing one full length, it seems I'm completely out of practice. God only knows when I'll next have an opportunity to swim... It probably won't be in the sea at Skegness, though...

The flight home wasn't as pleasant as the flight out there. For starters, we were sat apart - each on the end of a row of seats, either side of an aisle - and both of us were sat behind people who dropped their seats back without warning, which meant the in-flight entertainment was at an odd angle and our breathing room was a little restricted. The food wasn't as good, either, though the service was still very good. Next time, I think we'll upgrade to business class, if not first...

My girlfriend has hinted at some surprise that we didn't break up as a result of the holiday but, while our relationship may not be plain sailing, we've yet to argue about anything significant (and frequently fake arguements about whether she's 'Northern' (she's not) or whether I'm a Cockney (nope). Our sense of humour still tends along the same lines, though her anxieties occasionally cause a more severe reaction to some of my 'practical joking' than I had anticipated. Since the holiday, we've celebrated our second anniversary (a quick meal out and an evening of awesome improvised comedy at The Comedy Store), so our relationship is certainly still going.

Getting back to work after the holiday was easy enough, though I had to come home early on my first day back due to jetlag. Things have been unexpectedly hectic since then, with one of the year's largest products taking right up till the last minute to come together, and our regular deadlines compressed to ensure the products were delivered before Christmas.

There was also the office Christmas party, which I decided not to attend due to my experience of too many office Christmas parties with my last full-time job. I dodged out of most of them over the years, but felt more-or-less obliged to attend others. The company I worked for back then was basically banned from returning to every venue they used over about a five-year period for one reason or another (generally the foul behaviour of the younger members of staff), and the way they were organised never really suited me. Sit-down meals tended to descend into drunken binging, and those parties that offered only finger food were little different, except that I tended to leave hungrier.

My current employers insisted they'd be different whenever I told Christmas party horror stories from my past, yet they turned out to be much the same based on the stories I heard on Monday. My boss got paralytic and did several embarrassing things some of which, had she been male, might well have resulted in the loss of her job. One of the girls in Sales was desperately trying to chat up the gay designer. One of the guys in Sales was desperately trying to chat up anything female with a pulse. One might think there was the opportunity for a crossover there, but she apparently wasn't interested in anyone but the gay designer. It sounded as though some people had a good time, to be fair, but there was vomiting and, if the MD (who left early, and so was reporting second hand news and could easily have been joking) is to be believed, some fighting as well.

Nevertheless, we met all our deadlines... though the schedule wasn't especially well considered as it transpired that our distributors closed a day earlier than us, and so were unable to receive the last couple of magazines. We only received next year's schedule (beyond April) this week, and several dates look rather dodgy... Hopefully there will be some discussion about it in the New Year.

And so, here we are, on Christmas Eve. All our presents are wrapped, but we're having a quiet Christmas Day together in my flat, then heading to my folks on Boxing Day. After a day back home, we're heading off to Lincolnshire for a few days with my girlfriend's family, then returning before New Year, since I return to work the following day... The biggest thing we're doing is baking some Christmas cookies to take with us... Our Christmas dinner will be decidedly non-traditional.