“Do you still have anything left to say about Doctor Who?” my editor asked, with mild disbelief. “You have now written about this series four times in the past six weeks.” Do I still have anything left to say about Doctor Who (Sat, BBC One)? He might just as well have asked if I have anything left to say about the changing seasons, or the night sky, or my children or, frankly, myself.
When something is as good as Doctor Who — and, currently, it’s one of the best things about Britain in the 21st century — there’s always something to say about it. It’s like having a conversation about the Beatles. Theoretically, a conversation about the Beatles could span every aspect of humanity, theology, morality, art, sociology, fashion, and continue on up to the point where we die.
In fact, now I come to think of it, we’re all just continuing conversations about the Beatles handed down to us by our parents, and which we will, in turn, pass on to our children. Conversation about the Beatles is eternal — and the Beatles were just four lads from Liverpool. One of whom was Ringo.
Doctor Who, on the other hand, has the bonus of being about a goddamn Time Lord — with a Tardis! — minxing about the universe with a hot assistant; an assistant with whom the Doctor is locked in a situation of intensifying and possibly critical sexual tension. And that’s before we consider its other conversation-starting elements — such as its predilection for dealing with all the big issues of emotion and morality. Or the way the show was resurrected 20 years after its death by the wittiest, most postmodern fan a programme could hope to have: Russell T. Davies.
All that said, this week’s episode was essentially ephemeral. It was a bit of slapstick with Peter Kaye as a vile Absorbaluff — a lascivious green blob of what appeared to be the expanding foam that you inject into cavity walls, which was sporadically sprinkled with tufts of disturbing black hair, much in the manner of greasy spoon macaroni. Kaye, fairly understandably, appeared to be having a ball — licking his lips, rolling his eyes and brandishing his hoofy fingers with a well-observed delicacy.
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After Absorbaluffing one of the episode’s heroines, Ursula, he commented, “She tastes like chicken,” in the same way people do when they’re at a novelty bistro, trying crocodile meat, or snake.
In the event, the Doctor and Rose appeared merely as guest-stars in their own show — a small, humorous scrap with a cameo alien, and then materialising in the Tardis for a one-liner. The whole thing was clearly a mid-season intermission. A bit of light relief from the gathering clouds of the story-arc of the series — which, we gather from hints dropped in previous episodes, will centre on how and why the Doctor ended up killing all the other Time Lords. I cannot tell you how excited I am about this prospect. I was less thrilled and terrified about the impending birth of my first child.
However, as the episode was written by Davies, it was an exercise in the scale of the confidence and whimsy an artist can have in his or her Imperial Phase. An entirely digressionary treatise on the joys of ELO, a one-second clip of Elton John, the careless joy of the Doctor and Rose trying to kill a non-essential alien in the style of the Two Stooges — and then cutting it all dead with an unexpected, chilling line of dialogue, “Anyone getting close to the Doctor is eventually destroyed.”
Even when playing with the loveliest toy a scriptwriter ever had, Davies is hard as nails.
Voices in My Head (Sun) was a Channel 4 documentary that did what it said on the can — examine people who hear voices in their heads heads HEADS head heads — and contained a great deal of useful information, particularly for anyone interested in psychosis.
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In a nutshell, humans can build working, seemingly autonomous characters in their minds, which, once constructed, can run independently of the conscious mind — even working out mathematical problems that the conscious mind has never considered. It was pretty awesome stuff. Unfortunately, however, because of the directorial style — sinister soundtrack, whispering voices, disconcerting foetus puppets used to illustrate these autonomous characters — anyone who does have to deal with voices in their heads would probably have had a breakdown before the first ad-break, and had to put on a DVD of Friends instead.
This was clearly a poor result for people who hear voices. It has to be said, though, it was an even poorer result for Channel 4. On the basis of the research in their own show, they could have argued that each schizophrenic watching the show counted as four separate people, and easily added an extra million to the ratings. Duh.