Dr Who Saturday, BBC One
The IT Crowd Friday, Channel 4
If television programmes had dedications in the way that books do, Steven Moffat would have dedicated his first series of Doctor Who to Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Saturday’s finale played, as did the entire series, with Niffenegger’s notion that the lives of time travellers have chronological integrity. The Doctor may know lots, but he does not know what will happen to him next. What is more, he will run into people from his future who do. Chief among these was River Song, Alex Kingston’s bossy, bossy screwball-comedy alien, who has been hinting throughout that she is something big in the Doctor’s future. Is River Song this time-traveller’s wife? Towards the end of the tale, in a scene set at Amy Pond’s wedding to the restored Rory, she hinted that we shall soon find out.
Fans of the book will have registered on Saturday that Pond, like Clare in The Time Traveler’s Wife, first meets her time traveller as a child and that one crucial encounter occurs in a museum. But perhaps Niffenegger’s strongest influence has been to persuade Moffat to approach his unknowable new Doctor through the eyes of a perceptive female companion. Pond, fiercely played by Karen Gillan, has come closest to any of his assistants to knowing him; at times Matt Smith’s Doctor appears to have been caught by her and River in a female pincer movement more painful than any threat to his life.
Saturday’s wordy and complex finale closed down suggestions that Pond is the Doctor’s soul mate. Instead, she married Rory who, we are told, has spent 2,000 years guarding the Pandora’s box in which she has been incarcerated. Considering that in episode one Amy absconded in the Tardis on the eve of her wedding to him, making their relationship the love story of the past two millennia seemed a little unearned. To be picky, also, the 55 minutes were ludicrously jargon-ridden: reality was facing “total event collapse”; the Doctor had to “reboot the universe” by means of a “restoration field powered by an exploding Tardis”; the cost would be the Doctor being trapped in the “netherspace, the void between the worlds”. As for the Doctor being willed back into existence by an effort of memory, it was all a little too “I believe in fairies”. But never mind; this series has been a feat of virtuoso storytelling by Moffat and acting by Smith, the 27-year-old who now looks ageless in the role. There is no more assured drama on British TV.
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If Doctor Who has been exploring its feminine side The IT Crowd continues to pillory blokes. Like the writer Graham Linehan’s earlier sitcom Father Ted, The IT Crowd is located in an all-male world. Into it bubbles Katherine Parkinson’s Jen, continually dumbfounded by her colleagues’ nerdishness, misogyny and ignorance of women. On Friday she became Reynholm Industries’ entertainments manager, a role that required her to accompany corporate clients to lap-dancing clubs. Instead, she took them to The Vagina Monologues. (“That woman was in EastEnders. How dare you humiliate her?”). The men in Channel 4’s sitcom Peep Show are horribly recognisable; those in The IT Crowd are caricatured into harmless surrealism and are not. But that’s the joke: the show targets — phew — not us, but a platonic ideal of male stupidity. It is a clever comedy pretending to be a thick one, and raucously entertaining.