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.
