Now I Can Sleep Again

Twitter's #lesserdoctorwho strand has spent the last few weeks speculating on the stories that were changed at the last minute, when the producers decided that they weren't quite exciting enough for television. But this newly-leaked episode list reveals the whole truth about Doctor Who at its most repressed. Here are the titles of all the first drafts, before the monsters, cliffhangers, and random acts of mild fantasy violence were added...

"An Unearthly Chive", "The Ordinary and Nearby Things in Serbo-Croat", "The Hegde of Destruction", "Volkswagen Polo", "The Keith of Marinus", "The ASBOs", "The Censored Rites", "The Rain of Telford", "Planet of Gnats", "The Harlech Invasion of Earth", "The Cress Queue", "The Mormons", "The Pleb Planet", "The Fourth Crusade" (ooh, subtle), "The Spaced Museum" (involves Simon Pegg being stuffed and put in a cabinet), "The Kiss-Chase", "The Time Mid-Fielder", "Galaxy Cookie Crumble", "Mission to My Uncle's", "The Urban Myth Makers", "The Daleks' Mastercard", "The Mascara", "The Arse", "The Comestible Toymaker", "The Bunfighters", "The Chaffinches", "The Warm Machines", "The Snugglers", "The Clenched Planet", "Power of the Horlicks", "The High Pandas", "Underwater Tennis", "The Spoonface", "The Macrame Terror", "The Chinless Ones", "Weevil of the Daleks", "Room of the Cybermen", "The Easily-Meltable Snowmen", "The Nice Warriors", "Enema of the World", "The Web of Ears", "Curry from the Deep", "The Wheel in Spain", "The Dick-and-Dominators", "The Mind Rabbi", "The Insertion", "The Scrotums", "The Smell of Meths", "The Space Pierrots", "The Fwoar Games", "Nobhead from Space", "Doctor Who and the Silly Urinals", "The Ambassadors are Deaf", "Infirm... Oh", "Terror of Joe Orton", "The Milder Evil", "The Corrs of Axos", "Colostomy in Space", "The Lehmans", "Day of the Dahl Ex" (it's about Stan Collymore), "The Curse of Pele's Dong" (you know his personal problems), "The Sea Brevilles", "The Mucus", "The Tie Monster", "The Knee Doctors", "Bar-Nibbles and Monsters", "Jeux Sans Frontieres in Space", "Gannet of the Daleks", "The Green Douche", "The Time Woggler", "Invasion of the Dinah Shores", "Bollocks to the Daleks", "The Monstrous Pele's Dong" (after the treatment), "Planet of Spyware", "Rowboat", "The Parking Space", "The Sultana Experiment", "Genitals of the Daleks", "Revenge of the Sideburn Men", "Terrier of the Zygons", "Planet of Eejits", "Invalids of Mars", "The Adenoid Invasion", "The Brain of Mo Mowlam" (now even I've hit my good taste barrier), "The Spuds of Doom", "The False Nose of Mandragora", "The Thing That Dangles from the Back of the Cat's Throat and That the Mouse Uses as a Punchbag in 'Tom and Jerry' Cartoons of Fear", "The Shit Assassin", "The Face of Weebles", "The Roberts of Death", "The Nipples of Weng Chiang", "The Horror of Gla... Oh, Wait, Paul Magrs Has Already Done It", "The Wish-It-Had-Stayed-Invisible Enemy", "Imagining a Fondle", "The Sunbed Makers", "Underpants", "The Invasion of Rosemary and Thyme", "The Reebok Operation", "The Pyrex Planet", "The Scones of Blood", "The Handjobs of Tara", "The Power of Krill", "The Armageddon Factsheet", "Density of the Daleks", "Settee of Death", "Retcher from the Pit", "The Nightmare of Ewoks", "The Horns of Michael Nyman", "The Letcher Hive", "Dead Loss", "Full English Breakfast", "State of Decaf", "Warriors' Gateaux", "The Rob Green of Traken", "Legopolis", "Cats Revolt Her", "Four to Dounreay", "Kinda" (pronounced the other way), "The Vivisection" (my brother-in-law actually thought it was called that), "Bloke Orchid", "Earthchops", "Cancelled Due to Volcanic Ash in the Eighteenth Century", "Arc of Banality", "Cowdance", "Mawdryn Unplugged", "Dermititus", "Hen-Night in Kent", "The King's Detox", "The Three Doctors, a Dodgy Impression, and a Waxwork of Tom Baker", "Warriors on the Cheap" (trad), "The Awankening", the next one's too rude to print, "Rusty Ret-Con of the Daleks", "Planet of Ire", "Chavs of Androzani", "The Twin Dialysis", "Tacky Old Cybermen", "Vengaboys on Varos", "Skidmark of the Rani", "The Too-Little-Too-Late Doctors", "It Doesn't Actually Get Any Lesser Than This", "Revelation of the Diabetics", "Thighs of a Time Lord", "Time and Jim Varney", "Paradise Towels", "Delta and John Barrowman", "Dog on Fire", "Remembrance of the Dulux", "The Sloppy Mess Patrol", "Sylvia's Nemesis", "The Greatest Blow in the Galaxy" (wrong in at least two ways), "Cattle Field", "'Oh F***, It's Fenric'", "Goat Light", "Some Trifle".

That is all.

In-Between Days

"We will pan it, we will scan it / We will render it byte by byte / We will digitise, mass-produce and sterilise / We will turn it to shite, shite, shite." - Song of the Computer-Generated Mice on the Mouse Organ.

I think you should all know that I've finally worked out why I'm so at odds with the rest of modern culture. Or at least, why I don't seem to be down wit' da hip kids, and why I don't see Today's Stuff - particularly Today's Doctor Who Stuff - in quite the same way as other people in my own mildly dysfunctional peer group. Actually, working it out was quite easy: I just watched Spider-Man 3 on Channel 5.

Now, I loathe superhero movies. To be honest, I loathe anything CGI-driven that's indistinguishable from its X-Box tie-in. I loathe the artless techno-pettiness which believes the latest piece of industrial code from James Cameron or Peter Jackson to somehow qualify as cinema, even though the directors can't tell graphic realism from characterisation or a Tomb Raider end-of-level monster from a proper Balrog. But I double-loathe superhero movies, with extra bogies on. Not just because they're wholly founded on their "roll up, roll up, and see what we can make a digitally-generated humanoid do this year" faux-showmanship, but because they're so sodding banal. I crept into the cinema during the first Spider-Man in 2002 (I was leaving the cineplex after watching something else, there was no guard in the passage between screens, and the film was just starting… well, I wasn't going to pay), and ended up sitting through two hours of constipated narrative before a final showdown that looked for all the world like a massively overbudgeted episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. The fact that the jizz-awful Green Goblin mask was designed by the same man who wrangled everything from Zygon nodules to the Bespoke Time Lord Collar just made the experience more painful.

But I watched Spider-Man 3 on its terrestrial premiere, simply because… no, I don't mind admitting it. I used to read the comics when I was fourteen, and I'd gathered that this was the film in which Movie Spider-Man met Movie Venom. And in a moment of High Geekery, I wanted to see how the epic saga I'd read as a young 'un - a half-decade story-arc in which Spider-Man acquired a telepathic bodysuit from a bio-tech-happy uber-civilisation, then ditched it when he figured out that it was a parasite rather than a symbiote, then watched as it transmogrified its next victim into his Evil Twin - would be squeezed into a two-hour movie. In fact, the script managed this quite simply: it turned the alien git-costume into a meteorite full of goo, which conveniently happened to crash into a field right next to Peter Parker. The ineptitude of this was probably inevitable, but tragically I kept watching, and it's what else I learned from the movie that's been troubling me.

In Spider-Man 3, and all its bastard kin, there's a simple pattern. There are Big Events. You can tell the Big Events, because they're denoted by computer-generated action sequences. In this case, these include a skyscraper-chase between Spidey and Green Goblin Junior, a duke-out between Spidey and the Sandman (i.e. a man made of sand, because the Marvel universe is terribly literal), a "symbolic" passing-on of the meteor parasite from Spidey to Venom… punctuated, and I really do mean punctuated, by in-between scenes.

It's the in-between scenes which interest me. Nobody involved with the film seems in any doubt that the Big Events are the point of the exercise, yet spacing these out are the "slow" moments in which - ooh, let's say - Peter Parker talks to his Aunt May about something sentimental that no-one will ever remember, or goes through Relationship Problems with Mary-Jane that look exactly like the Relationship Problems you might get in an episode of Dawson's Creek, or goes all broody and starts to ask himself what he's doing with his life. Scenes which don't exist because any viewer might be capable of caring, but which instead act as a sort of Pavlovian buffer. I find myself remembering the extended schedules in early '70s porn cinemas, when audiences were required to sit through several hours of slightly pervy "documentaries" before the main feature, partly because it allowed the cinema-owners to appear legitimate and partly to make sure the punters were salivating by the time they got to see the first nipple.

The news that FX-based movies are stuffed with filler comes as no surprise, natch. Yet without understanding the way this kind of storytelling works, the modern form of Doctor Who makes absolutely no sense. I've been hugely critical of the last few years' worth of That Series I Grew Up With, but because I deliberately haven't been going to see arsecock like Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer (which I tried to watch on Channel 4 two weeks ago, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things… no, I obviously wasn't), I didn't realise why I seemed to be witnessing a different programme to an awful lot of other viewers. Simply, modern Doctor Who is made for an audience weened on superhero movies. That's not just the… excuse me… core demographic, it's what the programme is fundamentally aiming for. Over the last few years, whenever people I know have engaged each other in protracted conversations about the quality of the effects work on Dr Octopus' robot arms, I've had a tendency to leave the room. If I'd stayed, I might have clicked sooner.

My problem is that I don't believe in in-betweens. The very idea seems anathema to what might be called Proper Drama, but I'll stick close to home, and say that no Doctor Who story I ever considered half-decent was about the Big Event: the in-between moments were the story, not a way of marking time between special effects. The monster at the end of episode three isn't the main attraction of "The Caves of Androzani". Quite the reverse. Likewise, neither the Drashigs nor (most pertinently) the Top of the Pops-style psychedelia-gun in episode one are the reason "Carnival of Monsters" exists. And the giant clam certainly isn't the star of "Genesis of the Daleks", although now I've said that, I'm starting to wish that it were. By contrast, there's nothing really in "The Lazarus Experiment" except the ridiculous Mill-spawn (an apt example, given that Russell T. Davies explicitly described the story as being inspired by Marvel Comics), and BBC Wales is currently trying to sell us Matt Smith with the Sam Raimi-style shot of the Doctor dangling from a flying TARDIS. Rather than, for example, by getting him to do any acting. Let's not deny it, there were many, many, many filler scenes in the programme of old. But that's because it was made on the fly, on a minimal budget, under extreme stress. Whereas the modern programme has an insultingly large slice of the License Fee at its disposal, yet treats non-FX, non-stunt-based sequences as if they're dramatic pauses. Or, up until now, as excuses for David Tennant to do his "sad" face and make everyone go "awww, look, he's tortured".

You may, of course, recall that I keep insisting on seeing Doctor Who as a work of all-round BBC goodness rather than a "cult" sci-fi series. So I'll just point out that I, Claudius (yes, it is the best drama serial ever made, shut up) is nothing but in-between moments. In-between moments are good, if they're done properly. They're human. They give meaning to the parts where monsters or armies of legionnaires turn up, and should be treated as an art in themselves. Whereas we now have a culture which sees dialogue and characterisation as bubblewrap, except without the satisfaction of being able to pop the bubbles. Oh, and another telltale point: note that the Doctor is now being pitched to us with almost-macho displays of his power and invincibility ('there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap… me!!!' being both the latest and the stupidest), diluted forms of the "I'll be back" sloganeering you'd expect from America action heroes. When you can imagine Clint Eastwood delivering the Doctor's lines, but not Tom Baker, something's definitely gone awry. Actually, try imagining this kind of waffle being recited over a soundtrack by Dudley Simpson rather than Murray (spit) Gold, and it seems even dafter.

I could keep listing examples of the way this tendency has skew-wiffed recent Doctor Who, and I'm sure you'll be able to think of your own. But it's me, and I'm planning my exit strategy here, so I'll go for the big one. Yeah, I'm a-heading back to "Blink".

Now, here's the thing. When "Blink" was first broadcast, I got bored within the first twenty minutes, and assumed (as most of us do, in these "is it just me?" situations) that everyone else would feel the same way. You could've knocked me down with a Krolltacle when it was deemed to be the paragon of all things shiny, and for the last few years, I've been rather puzzled by the success of what seems to me like a rather dribbly script. After Spider-Man 3, however, I suddenly see it. What do people remember about "Blink"? The scary bits with the Weeping Angels, and the sexy bits with David Tennant talking to you - yes, you, straight female or gay male fan-person - out of a TV screen. Between those Big Events…?

Nobody much cares about those bits, and there's no reason that anybody really should. Sally's future-boyfriend (a geek called Lawrence, and I'm still not sure whether that was Moffat's idea of a joke) is introduced to us when he walks naked into a kitchen in front of the female lead and does the usual "ooh, hang on, am I naked?" schtick that sitcom writers use as filler when they don't have any better ways of getting the 18-30 demographic to keep watching. His nerdy personality is further underlined with the standard "all your friends are on the internet" bumf that even EastEnders had turned into cliché by 2007, while Sally spends much of the episode delivering the kind of dialogue that ageing heterosexual authors would like to imagine dynamic twentysomething women delivering in the real world, at least as long as they can imagine her saying "oh, yes, you big, rugged man who works in the media, yes, yes, yes" afterwards. Ah, but wait! This is supposed to be a scary story, yet the Weeping Angels don't actually do anything bad to anybody. So let's contrive a wholly negligible scene in which the Token Black Character snuffs it on his deathbed, just so Sally can say 'people have died', even though he's apparently had a pretty good life and we've spent more time watching him die as an old man than we spent getting to know him as a young one. Whoo, pathos.

This is terrible writing, and terrible characterisation. If you're a fan of "Blink", though, then… what do you remember? Do you remember anything at all about these puppet-people? Puppet-people on more than one level, in this case, since the plot of the episode is pretty much a denial of free will in the Doctor Who universe. Or do you just remember the creepy statues and the Easter Eggs? Plus some arse about timey-wimey paradoxes that the author's been constantly recycling since the 1990s, although that goes without saying in a Moffat script. (Jesus! I used to edit a thing called "Faction Paradox", but even I didn't resort to the old "we've seen evidence of this in the future, so it must be destined to happen" routine. Even once. Let alone five times. Yes, five! Count 'em.)

So, to summarise. I care about the in-between bits, because that's what I think "drama" is. The monsters are the moment of shock, they're not the story. Then again… if anything, does this just prove that I shouldn't be here at all? Interviews have cited Moffat as saying that he doesn't want to be remembered as the man who broke Doctor Who, but some of us would argue that he already did break it, even if we didn't notice it at the time. The moment of doom was "The Girl in the Fireplace", a story which - while quite good in itself, at least when the author's concentrating on robots, time-travel, and other things he pretends not to care about when there are women looking - changed our expectations of what the series is meant to be by playing to much the same audience as Twilight. From that point on, the Doctor was damned to a life of fetishism and well-groomed heroics. From that point on, he had to be young, cute, athletic, and godlike. Oh, and tragic. However unconvincing or repetitive the tragedy may be, he positively has to be tragic.

Looking at the revised, superhero-friendly version we've got in 2010, I find myself remembering two things about Moffat that I've previously suppressed. One is the conversation I had with him in late 2005, just after the title of his first Tennant-age story had been announced in the press. I said to him:

'Oh, I see a pattern forming here. First "The Empty Child", now "The Girl in the Fireplace". It's -'

And before I could say any more, he snarled into my face (in a fashion which, with hindsight, more than slightly resembled Rik in The Young Ones): 'Oh, what? Because they've both got the word "The" in the title?'

'Erm,' I said. 'Erm, no. Because they're both weird juxtapositions. You don't expect to get a child that's empty, and you don't expect to get a girl in a fireplace. It's like early surrealism. It's a bit… sort of… Magritte?'

He looked away. Stared at the pavement, as if annoyed by this outbreak of reasonable discussion. Then stomped off without answering.

But the most telling moment was this. I bought a video of The Complete Bagpuss (i.e. a video containing all thirteen episodes of Bagpuss, in case "Complete Bagpuss" sounds like one of the more obscure insults of Frank Butcher), and had it with me at the Tavern. I was showing it to a female acquaintance, when Moffat swooped past and looked down at it.

'That's just saaad,' he said.

'But… but it's Bagpuss,' said my acquaintance.

And Moffat twisted his face into a revolted sneer before leaving us.

Ergo. Having understood the nature of "state-of-the-art" narrative in the early twenty-first century, I can accept that this really is the Moffat Era, after all: an age of moments that could exist with equal comfort inside trailers or stories, movies or clips shows. But now I'm thinking of that scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which - as in Hamlet - the Prince's family ask R&G to figure out why Hamlet's so unhappy. Their conclusions: well, your dad's been unaccountably poisoned, your uncle's probably the murderer, and he's taken your throne while simultaneously marrying your mum. No, we can't imagine why you'd be unhappy. So for all those who've written badly-thought-out rants about this column over the last few years, and who genuinely can't tell the difference between "man who wants a war" and "man who's just disappointed and sarcastic", I'd like to say this…

Doctor Who taught me to be interested, xenophiliac, and prepared for strangeness of all magnitudes. Throughout its history - and this even applies to the best of the twenty-first-century episodes, before Big Russell started writing it for the BAFTA awards panel rather than intelligent children - it's been closer to Oliver Postgate than The Matrix. Yet now it's in the hands of a producer who's as arrogant as I've occasionally pretended to be and as cynical as I could never be, who deliberately overruled his own instincts and cast the silliest possible actor as the leading man, purely so he could continue his own mad campaign of pretend-populist squee. He sneers at Bagpuss, which is at least as bad as jesting at scars. Matt Smith has been given a demographically-tailored Quirky-Yet-Somehow-English costume, to make sure everyone feels comfortable accepting this as the same mass-produced product we got in the Tennant years, while the 2010 series has (it seems) been carefully stripped of any new or peculiar features and involves episodes written by the authors of "Exit Wounds", "The Idiot's Lantern", and Love Actually.

Now, why on Earth would I feel betrayed?

Look him in the eye and tell me I'm wrong.

Journey's End

I always said I'd stick with Doctor Who until the end of time.

My associate Tat Wood - who, if you're wondering about our relationship, swings erratically between "my wise and trusted friend" and "that git I'd like to punch in the face, very hard and quite often" - is delighted by the prospect of 2010. He's delighted because he wants to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of "Meglos". Not because he actually likes it, you understand: he finds it appealing because he sees it as the ultimate rite of passage, the event you have to sit through if you want to call yourself a Doctor Who fan and prove that you're capable of chewing the gristle as well as swallowing the steak. It's not the worst Doctor Who story ever made, as even Tat would agree. It's just the epitome of wig-wearing, badly-conceived-planet-bearing, late-'70s-but-in-the-early-'80s stupidity. Survive it while treating it as proper television, not making jokes about Space: 1999 or UFO (or Star Maidens, as Tat recently pointed out to me), and you'll be a man, my son. Or a woman, my daughter. No, probably a man, no woman would bother.

Many different geeks of many different hues will be reading this, quite possibly including Tat himself. So I'll divide the comments into discreet paragraphs. And, indeed, discrete paragraphs.

DON'T READ THIS IF YOU THINK THE MULTIPLE SUNS OF "PLANET OF THE DEAD" SHINE OUT OF RUSSELL T. DAVIES. I'm writing these words one day before "The End of Time" (i.e. it's Christmas Eve where I am), but I think we've all seen the pictures of the cactus-faced people from the Christmas / New Year story, even in the Radio Times. Which makes me wonder… if "The End of Time" is reaching its conclusion on the first day of 2010, then is Big Russell also celebrating thirty years of "Meglos"? Does he recognise his own failure, and want to express it in xerophyte form? Is he subconsciously saying "Praise Be to Ti"? Or what?

DON'T READ THIS IF YOU'RE TAT. I REPEAT, DON'T READ THIS IF YOU'RE TAT. Yeah, right, "Meglos" is the stupid-looking one. You know what Tat's idea of greatness is? "The Stones of Blood". In my book, that isn't even broadcastable. Not that I actually like "Meglos". I'm just saying.

Yet, as per usual, Tat makes a good point which we can only see clearly after we've finished swearing at him. Like an aristocrat (in the proper Ted-and-Ralph way, not the being-a-prince-and-dressing-as-a-Nazi way… oh, all right, in the Lady Michelle Ryan's Big Gold Cup way rather than the Slug King from "The Twin Dilemma" on His Evil Throne way), Tat thinks about generations rather than moments. So we should follow his lead and consider the future. Specifically, how the people to come will see this programme.

Mmmm.

Er…

Look, I'm sorry to say this, but it's probably time. Russell T. Davies made Doctor Who unkillable by bringing it back in the 2005 style, for which we should thank him. It went against all the rules of TV in the middle of what we're now supposed to call the Noughties, and it won. It bloody won. Of course, in the process, it spawned a number of imitators. All of whom kept the format, but abandoned the risks. Robin Hood? Doctor Who with macho. Merlin? Doctor Who with spells (watch it back-to-back with "The Shakespeare Code", and see what strikes you). Spooks…? Well, Spooks was "conceptualised" even before Chris Ecc, but it's now feeding off David Tennant's prajna in a big way. However, human entropy insists on turning all good ideas into cack, and we can see it here. People copy Doctor Who; Doctor Who-makers go to BAFTA ceremonies, where they rub various body-parts with the folk who do the copying; the Doctor Who-makers start to believe that the flattery must be true, and ergo start making a version of Doctor Who which copies the copies. The result is a levelling-out of energy that makes Our Programme look more banal with every episode.

It's unkillable, but it's wrong. Thrice-wrong now that the series has taken the coward's route, and replaced Tennant with a poxy, gormless, quasi-sexy young Doctor who might possibly turn out to be Tennant II in the public imagination. It is, if you will, like the undying corpse in eternal agony who turns up in Tales from the Crypt. Future generations will remember this series as "One of Those CGI Programmes", and it's apt that Russell T. has compared the indestructible central character with Sherlock Holmes, given that Sherlock Holmes is now the title of an FX-driven film which also has very little to do with the original. It's tempting to go for the easy shot, and point out that Big Him is now living in Los Angeles, yet the truth is that we should've known something was wrong as soon as "The Sound of Drums" showed us a version of modern-day Britain in which nobody exists unless they’re on TV.

All right, I'll say it. I hate this programme now. I hate the way that David Tennant - a brilliant, scintillating young actor, half a decade ago - has been turned into the laziest hack in the country thanks to even-lazier writers who earn their keep by scripting "things David Tennant always does as the Doctor". I hate the self-indulgent, ultra-masturbatory drivel that comes from treating the male lead as an object of fetishism ("Forest of the Dead" was bad enough, but the final minutes of "The Waters of Mars" were an insult to all human intelligence). I hate the fact that Doctor Who no longer means "going to strange places and seeing what happens", but "casting celebrities and seeing how much publicity we can get by putting them next to shite CGI monsters". I hate the thought that the mythology with which I grew up is now being re-routed for idiots who like superhero movies. "Talky bit, suggested menace, special effects set-piece, talky bit with sad orchestral music, set-piece number two, increase in menace, effects climax, hugs."

Hey, but it's Christmas! So look on the bright side. Next year, we get a whole series run by Moffat. The man whom Russell T. Davies cited as having solid gold brain-cells (even though his ideas ran out even before he became producer and chief writer, unless "Silence in the Library" really was a demo script he wrote in 1992, as many of us have suspected); the man who went on record as saying that he doesn't want to be remembered as the one who "broke Doctor Who" (bit late to worry now… he broke it with "The Girl in the Fireplace", a story which was quite good in itself - at least, when there were killer clockwork robots on the screen and the author didn't have to pretend to care about credible female characters - but which damned the series to an eternity of inane pretend-sexiness). And look what he's giving us! Churchill and the Daleks. A two-part Silurian story written by Chris Chibnall. Richard f***ing Curtis. Some of these are still in the "unconfirmed" file, but the fact that they even exist as rumours should tell you everything you need to know. Anyone would think the new boss is deliberately hiring the worst people imaginable, just to make himself look good. Except that he's also (supposedly) doing a two-parter which involves both Professor River Song and the Weeping Angels. Riiight. Big new ideas.

I've said, over and over, that the Doctor Who spin-offs might have been world-exploding if they'd been controlled by vaguely competent people. Instead, BBC Wales hired Chibnall for one, and then managed to sink even deeper into the offal-pit of ineptitude by finding Phil Ford for the other. Now Doctor Who itself is about to be run by the worst possible person, not because Moffat is a bad writer in himself - he isn't, and if those of you who still resent me would like to re-examine that "Pissing Blink" comment, then I think you'll find I was praising him for a certain sort of script - but because he's always going to take the easy option. This is, and always was, a programme about experiment and experience. It's the highest point of licence-fee telly. Nowadays, though, its creators always play safe.

What I want for Christmas, geek-wise? A Doctor Who writer with balls. Or ovaries, they'll do. Glands of any description would be good. But given the line-up for 2010… may I skip out now? I really, really, really, really don't want to see what happens next. I'm sure that the older nerdlings among us have felt the desire to give up at some point, the way I did during the cold, stark horror of Season 24, or in the most insipid period of the BBC Books run, or after "The Impossible Planet". But they were all cases of Doctor Who being Not Very Good. Now it's different. Now it's a case of Doctor Who being… well, nasty. Cynical. Smug.

Of course, I'll take it all back if "The End of Time" turns out to be half-decent.



DON'T READ THIS UNLESS YOU'RE ACTUALLY MOFFAT. "Mangling the English language"…? Is that really the strongest comeback you can manage? You're becoming complacent, y'old twat. You can do better than clichés. And please do so, or everyone else will want to give you a good slap as well.

Day Four... Ooh, I'm Getting Into This Now

Yeah, I still like this week's Torchwood. Sorry about that.

To misquote Hugh "Take Me Up the Arse, America" Laurie, who did the voice-over for a US breakfast cereal ad that's since become better-known as a gag about Michael Jackson on Family Guy (God, that's too many references even for me, but please bear with me because it'll get even more obscure by the end of this entry):

The left-wing kid in me hates the fact that the 456 are automatically evil for trying to take children away. I mean, they gave us a Hello-style tour of their charming tank, didn't they? And we don't know that Animatronic Boy is suffering. He may be having a great time in there, acting as a Macra's conscience and swanning around the universe like the navigators in movie-Dune. What the vomiting 456-beast says to Captain Jack is technically correct, after all: we really don't give a toss about the children, unless they're our own.

But the left-wing adult in me likes the fact that politicians are being this awful in something approaching the Doctor Who universe. Indeed, I think we can describe Children of Earth at a stroke with the words '"The Sound of Drums" done properly'. Or possibly '"The Ambassadors of Death" with balls'.

Also, I bet that someone involved in this series (probably Big Russell himself, but you never know) has seen Cosmic Slop. A 1994 TV movie so little-known that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, but which features a similar pseudo-dilemma on behalf of the political class, i.e. the US government has to consider whether to give a sizeable proportion of its black population to aliens in return for massive and immediate wealth. The "we could save billions by giving them Chavs" scene is almost identical.

Beat that, Tat.

One of Us is Real... Is It Me?

Apparently, they do work.

I've been on prescription anti-depressants for about a year now. I've mentioned this before, but I've never mentioned the most important (and obvious) effect: the dreams.

We dream about things we know. When we dream about things which seem unfamiliar, they're made out of things we've seen and heard, half-seen and half-heard: a strange room is a room we might have known from infancy, sexed-up with images we've picked up from TV in the intervening years. At least, that's what I've always expected, and that's what I've always argued. But over the last twelve months, ever since I started taking the pills, every single night has been an away-match. There's not much percentage in trying to explain the details, because the sheer amount of sensual information in even one of these dreams - experiencing every twist of the landscape, every niche of the architecture, every sound and smell and peculiarity of a completely unknown environment - would need pages and pages and pages. And quite possibly pages. I'm there, in a way that I'd previously assumed you can only be "there" in real, physical, three-dimensional space.

I'm in no way superstitious, in no way New Agey. Quite the reverse: I'm a hardcore rationalist, no spirits or extra-sensory avatars allowed. Yet I can't find any explanation for what I've been witnessing over the last three-hundred-odd nights, and saying "the drugs are giving me delusions" just isn't a good enough answer. Yes, they probably are giving me delusions, but... where are those delusions getting their information from? How can I be so aware of the precise details of hillsides, libraries, streets, museums, oceans, offices, wastelands that I've never visited / seen on television / read about in books / even imagined? Why do I know what the tiling looks like in this house? Why do I know where all the best picnic-sites are, on a patch of ground where I can find myself tripping over every last knoll? Why do I meet complete strangers and know them in so much detail, right down to the jawbone-structures of faces I've never seen...? Psychic phenomena can kiss my arse, yet I simply can't account for this glut of data in any way except - oh, atheist gods forgive me - by assuming that I'm tapping into some peculiar Sheldrakian mass-consciousness. I like to think I'm an imaginitive human being. But my imagination isn't up to this level of creativity, and it's certainly not up to inventing a new territory every single bloody night without ever repeating itself. It is, quite simply, as if the drugs have blown something open in my head. And now I'm assimilating other people's sensory information into my own delusions.

And no, I don't believe in telepathy either.

But stranger than the otherness-of-place is the effect on time. We all know that time in dreams doesn't mirror time in reality, yet the hours spent asleep seem to be stretching in ways I've never experienced before. I've occasionally woken up sobbing, because my dream-self believes that it's been trapped in Bad Place A or Bad Situation B for months, and doesn't believe it'll ever escape. On the plus side, I've also experienced whole chunks of lifetime that simply shouldn't be possible over the course of seven hours. Example:

Last night, I was a member of a (wholly imaginary) film club that met every Thursday night to watch (also imaginary) kitsch films of the 1950s and 1960s. I remember those non-existent films in detail. Also the building in which we met, the grounds outside, the other members of the club, the terrible snacks we used to make in the tiny (pretend) kitchen... oh, and a (similarly imaginary) member of my (make-believe) family used to pick me up in her car at the end of every film-evening, usually with a (spurious, but consistent) passenger in the front seat. I believe the family-member was my cousin, and the passenger was a female friend of hers whom I found rather snidy and annoying. I say "usually", because I went to at least five weekly screenings in the course of the dream. On one occasion - when the film was some dreadful Irwin Allen-type schlock about cities under the sea, much like Stingray with real people instead of puppets - I had to go outside and tell my cousin that the film had a few minutes left to run, and yes, it was shite but I had to stay anyway. Why this sense of completism...? I felt duty-bound, since I worked for a magazine which dealt in all things pop-cultural and quasi-ironic. I remember the exact floorplan of the offices, not comparable to any real building I've ever visited. But I still knew where all the facilities were, not to mention the complete cast of employees, one of whom was an absolute bastard with whom I had a running feud. Fortunately, I also knew who to talk to in order to piss him off, and there was a... no, it's too complex to explain here, but the ramifications lasted for weeks. I particularly remember the time when I had to review a complete DVD boxed set of The New Avengers, and although I recall writing a detailed precis for younger readers which explained the need for Gareth Hunt to do "action" sequences beyond the capabilities of the ageing Steed, it was nonetheless a boxed set of The New Avengers from a parallel universe in which half of the stories were set in space. This may sound random, but my subconscious had thought about it to such a degree that the episode with the giant rats in the sewers (you know, the one that was shamelessly ripped off by "The Talons of Weng-Chiang") took place on a space-station in upper-Earth orbit which for some reason had an archaic sewage system. I still remember the plot, once again in disturbing detail. I could storyboard most of the chase scenes even now.

Eighteen months, I worked at that place. Eighteen months, with occasional film-club nights, of which - I admit - I remember only five. Eighteen bloody months, learning every crook of the building, every idiot twitch of my co-workers, every quirk of that game they played where... actually, that's probably too much detail as well, although I'm thinking of remaking it in the real world. But I had to suffer eighteen months of it. Twatting geeks. Eventually I even had to meet their friends outside of work, and they were hideous.

And then I woke up.

(Wait. Was there an episode of The New Avengers with giant rats in the sewers? I'm convinced that there was, even when awake, but it also sounds like the kind of thing I might have contrived while sleeping. I'll look it up later.)

The point is that I'm honestly not sure what's solid any more, because if one day is separated from the last by eighteen months of make-believe which feel at least as intense as everything else, then you're bound to lose continuity. Most peculiarly, I believe I'm living in a world where I just saw two episodes of Torchwood that were actually good. This is improbable, yet the detail was such that I'm inclined to think they were real. Then again, everything seems that detailed now, and further doubt is cast by the fact that the episodes in question featured Katy Wix. Katy Wix...! The name probably means nothing to you, but it has a full-on resonance for me (and those of you who used to read the Randomness Times may remember a photo in which she appeared as an octopus in a top hat). Ever since I went all stand-up in 2006, I've made a point of seeing her Edinburgh shows in preview, and not for any mentalist stalker-like reasons. She's quite simply quite good. A few months ago, however, I finally came face-to-face with her and tried to say hello. I felt I could reasonably do this, since she'd performed in some of the sketches I wrote for Recorded for Training Purposes on BBC7. So of course, my absolute social ineptness caused me to come across as a mentalist stalker, after which I ran away and resolved never to try talking to talented people ever again. Katy appears in many of my dreams these days, for the fairly obvious Freudian reason that she represents the whacking great gulf between my absolute competence as a writer and my absolute incompetence as a human being. Her appearance in the mythical good Torchwood story is, therefore, both clearly symbolic and just taking the piss. Although I note that whereas she's an alert, intelligent, sparkly-eyed young woman in the real world, here she's playing a fat Welsh chav with the complexion of BBQ-flavour Pringles. And with terrible teeth. I'm sure her teeth aren't that bad in the real world, I would've noticed.

The thing is, though... if we assume that what I think I'm watching is real, then Torchwood is suddenly working because it's abandoning all the '90s-style "Cult TV" trappings that led Chr*s Ch*bn*ll to try to make it as much like Angel as possible, and trying to be a proper BBC drama serial instead. What I think I saw was like Quatermass without the smug intolerance of Nigel Kneale or the drivelly nostalgia of Mark sodding Gatiss. No, wait, it was like a modern version of A for Andromeda (hence the plot device of aliens-send-instructions-for-receiver). And it was clearly better than either of the other modern versions of A for Andromeda, i.e. the God-awful BBC4 remake and the Hollywood one with the sexy-older-woman out of CSI, whatever it was called.

Did I really see that? I actually care what's going to happen in episode three. That's not natural for Torchwood, is it?

It's past nine o'clock in the morning. I've been awake for over 24 hours now. I want to go to sleep, but if I do, then it might be years before I can think about this again.

Thumbnail Review: "Planet of the Dead"

Hahahahahah. Hahahah.

No, but seriously. Where's the real Easter Special?

God, how do you describe the awfulness of that last hour...? Let's start with basic scriptwriting principles. The whole point of transporting a London bus to the middle of the desert is that it puts the everyday inside the impossible. Yet we begin this story with an aristocratic cat-burglar doing the full Pink Panther schtick, as if to demonstrate that nothing about this story exists in the real world. Within ten minutes, everything here has been established as a fantasy-telly standard with no grounding in anything we might recognise, so we're basically watching Spice World II: The Scorpion Nebula. Worse, the people on the bus who aren't shameless works of self-indulgent pap-fiction turn out to be the same jokey working-class fodder we saw in "Father's Day", which means that their only function is to (a) die or (b) cry until the Good, Wonderful, All-Powerful Doctor reassures them with thoughts of chops. Except for the one who is, bizarrely and uselessly, psychic. This is followed by ten minutes of arseing-around in the desert which seem to exist only to prove how great David Tennant is, and to prove that nothing matters in storytelling terms except the need to invent new forms of faux-science to push the plot along. After that, there's twenty minutes of the Doctor explaining alien things to Michelle Ryan, whose complete lack of charisma beats the programme to death like a Medieval child who's been born with the wrong number of heads.

And then, Lee Evans.

After half an hour, nothing interesting has happened. Then there's some sub-Star Trek bollocks about wormhole-making things destroying Earth, which makes the same mistake as the very worst pulp SF of the '50s: saying that Earth is going to be destroyed doesn't make things seem dramatic, unless you can make it palpable. We're told that this is important because we see some CGI skeleton-fish on a hologram, and we're told it's a major crisis. We don't care. We've got no stake in it. It's not a major crisis, it's just Tennant running around and twiddling with improbable technology, while his sidekick makes some smug comments which are supposed to establish her as a strong, independent woman but actually make her seem like an over-talkative action figure. Finally, the manta-ray monsters turn up, and they're as trite and as tedious as everything else. Oh, what a surprise! They're defeated by a spurious piece of machinery. We've been brought on this journey just so we can look at a flying bus. Yeah, thanks. If we wanted that, then we'd watch Harry Potter, like everyone else.

Never have I felt more justified in my decision to f*** off and be somewhere else when this series - the series I've followed since I was two years old - finally dies. This isn't Doctor Who. It isn't even sophisticated enough to qualify as fan-fic.

(For the version that was written before broadcast, see this week's Randomness Times. Which is probably funnier, because I was less annoyed.)

"Danish Kiddie-Fiddler Ring Infiltrates Toy Packaging Shock"

Twenty-four hours until Christmas Day. Thirty-two hours until I find out how badly my relatives have misjudged my personality while attempting to think of a suitable gift, thirty-six hours until I have to ask myself whether I really am going to bother roasting something for lunch rather than settling for a tube of Pringles with a picture of holly on the wrapper, forty hours until I find myself joining in with every single word of The Two Ronnies. Just under forty-three hours until "Voyage of the Damned", the BBC's new vehicle for Bernard Cribbins.

Oh, all right. Since we're on the subject… at 6:50 on Christmas Day, Film Four will be showing Time Bandits, which may literally be the worst piece of scheduling in television history. Time Bandits is a wonderful thing, but is there anybody that might want to watch an eccentric timetravel- based comedy-adventure who won't be otherwise engaged at 6:50 on Christmas Day? Even if a few Film Four viewers have somehow lost track of the time and forgotten to switch over to BBC1, surely they're going to find themselves thinking "hang on, I'm sure there was something I meant to do" during the sequence set on board the Titanic?

My great-grandfather was booked to travel on the Titanic, as part of a transatlantic business trip. He pulled out at the last minute. Our family history doesn't record why he pulled out, but if you're familiar with "Rose", then you'll understand why I find this amusing. Perhaps he was talked out of it by a big-eared Mancunian. And I see that in the weekend papers, one of the few still-living Titanic survivors has objected to the BBC's lack of Christmas Day tact, although she doesn't really seem to have captured the mood of the nation.

Given that the Christmas Doctor Who is the BBC's highest-yield warhead, it's interesting to note how the other channels have decided to deal with it. ITV has elected to show The African Queen, a film which could happily be screened on any Sunday afternoon without causing a fuss (thus wisely avoiding any attempt at a ratings war… it's like 1977 all over again). It works both ways, though: BBC3's Doctor Who Confidential, which is usually scheduled to immediately follow its parent-programme, begins half an hour after Doctor Who ends. And it's not as if BBC3 has anything better to do at eight o'clock, because it's showing a repeat of Football Gaffes Galore. But then you realise… at eight o'clock, ITV is presenting us with Harry Hill's Christmas TV Burp. Has the BBC noticed this, and delayed Confidential by half an hour, knowing that Doctor Who and Harry Hill share an awfully large chunk of the audience? This is, after all, a man who opened his very first show on Channel 4 by wrestling a giant maggot.

Like any good warhead, Doctor Who makes a big bang while covering the surrounding area with fallout, and this Christmas it's hard to look at any page of the (haaaa-lle-lu-jah) Radio Times without seeing traces of its influence. We note that the BBC's other "big" programmes this season include The Catherine Tate Show and The Shadow in the North with Billie Piper, neither of which is technically supposed to be Doctor Who-related, but the RT has thoughtfully put the interviews on the same page anyway. We'll gloss over David Tennant's appearance in Extras - a programme which, in all other respects, has a cast list that could only be worse if it had more than one copy of Ricky Gervais in it (in much the same way that ITV is marking New Year's Eve with a comedy-drama starring James Dreyfus in two different roles, i.e. a programme that's twice as bad as you might possibly imagine) - and instead turn our attention to New Year's Day, when we get BBC1's new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, written by leading-dramatist-turned-soft-core-hack Andrew Davies. We might expect plenty of period stripping-off, with no actual genitalia but lots of male buttocks thrusting in and out of multi-layered underwear. I mention this only because Mark Gatiss is in it. Surely, he isn't going to be doing any deflowering? His chat-up technique in "The Lazarus Experiment" was bad enough, but now I'm trying to imagine him seducing a nineteenth-century virgin, and all I can think of is Briss the Butcher. Licking his lips. In close-up.

And since I'm not newsgroup-formatted, it was only this week that I learned of the existence of the on-line Doctor Who advent calendar, which provides a daily ration of photos, interviews, exclusive clips, downloadable chocolates and special coupons promising you a place at God's right hand if you watch the programme on Christmas Day. If I'd known about this sooner, then I might not have bothered writing 15,000+ words in the last three weeks: compared to footage of Kylie Minogue larking about in a maid's outfit, I can see how a JPEG of a box of Lego or a group shot of Android, Cyborg and Muton might seem insufficiently festive. (Oh, perhaps I should explain today's picture. Yes, this is a real Lego set. It celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Lego Brick, and is a modernised version of the "classic" Lego Town from 1958, so the leering old man represents a grown-up / grown-old version of someone who might have bought the original '50s models as a ten-year-old. Out of context, though, he just looks like a paedophile laying bait.)

So as the Doctor Who Christmas Special approaches, we simply have to acknowledge that Russell T. Davies not only has the best job in the world, but the best job that's ever existed in the whole of human history. Some people have criticised my occasional bitterness towards the series by claiming that I'm just jealous, to which I respond: well, duh. We should consider that Big Russell not only has executive control over Doctor Who as a concept, but access to a multi-squillion-pound budget with which to depict anything in the entire span of space and time, almost on a whim. Even Hollywood executives don't have this sort of reckless power. The only person in / on television who's in a similarly enviable position is Gok Wan, easily-anagrammed presenter of Channel 4's How to Look Good Naked, whose job description involves touching up the wobbly parts of overfed women while they nod seriously and listen to his sage council on what bras to wear. But since Wan is (presumably) gay, it's safe to assume that he has no conception of how lucky he is.

With great power comes great responsibility: this is what I was getting at during the "Unquiet Dead" farrago, and if it was true of Gatiss, then it's twentyfold-true of Big Russell. This man has more influence over the minds of the nation's youth than anybody else in contemporary British culture - go on, prove me wrong - and according to the interviews, he even has the ability to make Kylie wee herself. ITV fears him. Ant and Dec have known his wrath. He may not be as famous as David Beckham, but then, nobody actually listens to what David Beckham says. Fortunately he tends to use this power for good, or at least, to say things like "I know, let's put rhinos on the moon!". But this doesn't mean we should take our eyes off the bugger, because…

…because even if power doesn't always corrupt, then showbiz invariably does. I know I'm not alone in feeling that "The Sound of Drums" marks a very specific jumping of the shark, yet apart from the relative dullness of it, two things seem especially worrying. One is that although it continues the twenty-first-century Doctor Who obsession with stores set in something like "the real world", the programme's idea of what constitutes "the real world" is becoming increasingly slanted towards the point-of-view of people who work in television. In much the same way that Jennifer Saunders is no longer capable of doing anything other than making jokes about meeting minor celebrities at BBC TV centre, Doctor Who's two default methods of establishing a contemporary British setting are (a) guest appearances by famous people playing themselves, and (b) set-pieces involving any event where TV cameras might be present (note that apart from the regulars and semi-regulars we already know, there are no modern-day characters in "The Sound of Drums" other than media figures and Saxon's co-conspirators). In other words, the Doctor's natural environment these days is a BAFTA awards ceremony. No other Doctor would seriously have considered putting on a dinner jacket for "Rise of the Cybermen" or "The Lazarus Experiment", because no other Doctor belongs on the Red Carpet. Tom Baker in
formalwear would have been unconscionable; David Tennant in formalwear seems perfectly normal.

Once you realise this, Tennant's appearance in Extras is rather unsettling, because you begin to see that the two programmes are converging on the same territory. "Real world" stories are supposed to draw in the viewers by giving the adventures-in-space-and-time concept some grounding in the world we recognise, but the Britain we see in "The Sound of Drums" just alienates us. Even if there are TV studios, press interviews and high-society get-togethers, there are very few actual people, so it's no more familiar to us than Mangooska Six in the ninetyeighth century. Using actual BBC presenters and perfect mock-ups of News 24 bulletins (starting with "Rose", but most notably in "Aliens of London") was clever, yet we've now reached the point where modern-day Britain doesn't seem to contain anything else, a version of the country in which TV is the only reality. We know that the Doctor, Martha and Captain Jack are in trouble, because their faces are on the television news; we know that the death of the President of the USA is a turning-point, because it's broadcast to the whole world; even the Master has started taunting the Doctor via the BBC, and just to rub it in, there's a bomb in the TV set.

If this were a story about television, a la "The Long Game", then this might make sense. But it isn't: the Master controls the population with a spurious hypno-satellite, not by manipulating the media, which blows a hole in the idea that this might be a satire. It's just how the programmemakers see the world these days. Similarly, even those who actually like Catherine Tate would have difficulty arguing that she can provide the voice of One of Us, which is theoretically what the companion is there for. She's been hired specifically because she's a Television Celebrity, so there's automatically a gulf between herself and the audience.

And if we're talking about a series that's rapidly becoming lost in showbiz, then this leads us on to the second problem with "The Sound of Drums": Ann Widdecombe is an evil Tory bigot, while Sharon Osbourne is a vicious parasitic brood-harpy who drinks the spinal fluid of little children. If only metaphorically. The point is, I'm having problems with the irony threshold here. These people are clearly - as it were - servants of the Jagrafess, people who might reasonably have been depicted as The Enemy during the Eccleston season. When did they become Friends
of Doctor Who?

That's enough cynicism. On a lighter note, this is also the time of year when we play the two key Doctor Who guessing-games, the "Who's Going to Be Next Year's Big Historical Guest-Star?" game and the "Name a Contemporary Character Actor Who's Likely to Turn Up in a Minor Role" game. However, we already know that 2008's Historical Guest Star duties are going to be shared by Agatha Christie and a great big volcano. (I'm hoping the Pompeii story will be a historical farce a la "The Romans", in which the Doctor and a young Captain Jack run around the streets of the city on Volcano Day but somehow never meet. Please, God, any excuse for a historical that doesn't have sodding aliens in it. Surely, CGI lava is as big an audience-grabber as CGI monsters?) As for the Character Actor game… this takes some skill, and requires us to think about the kind of television-friendly performer who's likely to move in the same circles as the production team. After the 2005 season, my guess for 2006 was Louise Delamere; I was close, but she eventually ended up in Torchwood instead. Last year, my guess for 2007 was Lucy Montgomery; again, I was on the right lines, since Debbie Chazen (the other one from Tittybangbang) is in "Voyage of the Damned". For 2008… how about absolutely anybody who was in Oliver Twist? Although personally, I'm still amazed that Celia Imrie has managed to avoid the series for so long.

I will, of course, continue to act like the frustrated conscience of Doctor Who fandom throughout the coming year. Because some f***er's got to do it.

And a Merry Cribbins to all of you at home.